


Else Concealing It

by youabird (nevulon)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Howling Commandos - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death, Panic Attacks, Period-Typical Homophobia, World War II, body issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-17 22:31:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7288678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevulon/pseuds/youabird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thirteen days on the road with Steve, Bucky and the Howling Commandos, autumn 1944.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> when you get so mad at Avengers 2/Cap 3 that you have to go back to WW2. also, my calling in this fandom is snarkiness + suffering.

 

 

“She’s a beautiful woman, Cap. A very, very beautiful woman.”

Steve turns, looks. The French woman that Jim is looking at is looking nowhere near him. Her jet-black hair is curled and pinned to accentuate, not hide, her strong jaw. She looks like a crow, somehow, the red slash of her mouth turned up into a smile. He watches her cigarette burning like a beacon and feels his stomach rearrange.

“A real tall drink of water.” The slang is unwieldy on Monty’s tongue. He says it again, over the bustle of people and the dollar-store piano competing with the sound of glass thunking against wood tables. _A real tall drink of water._

“Oh, Jesus, she’s too tall for me,” Steve says. “Or she’s too aware that she’s tall, you know what I mean? She looks like she’d like to challenge me to arm wrestle.”

“You wouldn’t want to arm wrestle a beautiful lady like that?”

“Well, I couldn’t beat her fair-and-square, I’d break her arm. And if I let her win,” he says, pointing at them, grinning, “I’m sure you clowns would never let me hear the end of it.”

They laugh. They stink, but the heavy smell of unwashed bodies has been beaten into the bar long before. Into the carpet, the ceiling. All bars are the same, everywhere. This bar is the Gallic successor to the sorts of bars he used to get thrown out of in Brooklyn. It could be anywhere, at any time. Three weeks ago, the proprietress was serving warm beer to Nazis; now, she’s pouring pints for GIs. Nothing changes, except the language of the drunken chatter.

They keep laughing, and Steve watches the exits, watches his men. Watches Gabe move, slow and fluid, over towards the far door. A couple of slant-faced guys glare at him. Steve’s knuckles curl, but Gabe wanders away again, following the barmaid. Even still, his heartbeat taps out double-time until the other soldiers slink away.

Dum-Dum says his name, and he turns his head. “You could have any woman in this bar you want, Cap. Any woman!” His color’s up. They’ve been drinking since noon, since they stumbled back into base and scrubbed just enough blood off to be presentable. “How does that power not go to your head?”

 _Power_? He laughs. The dark-haired woman glances his way, elegant and dismissive. Her hair looks more like a raven, he decides. Up at the bar, drunk and affectionate, Gabe half-stumbles into Bucky and claps Dernier on the shoulder, slurring in liquid French. Despite all this, somehow, when he tunes back into the discussion at hand, they’re still talking about Steve.

Monty says, “I’ll wager it feels good. That raw animal magnetism.” And he looks at Steve. They all do.

He shrugs. He folds his hands on the tabletop. Yes, he’d like to say, there are certain advantages. Like being tall enough to read the menu at the bar.

“Mostly,” he says, “It feels new. Real new. I’m more used to girls walking right by me.”

“Bull _shit_.” They all laugh. Even Gabe’s head flicks up from yards away. Trotting towards them, he’s got _another_ beer in his hands and the others on his heels.

“See, I just can’t wrap my head around it.” He shrugs again. Only Peggy was there in the room with the curved steel box and the vita-rays, but they’ve seen blue light disintegrate a man. Where, he wonders, is the faith? “You, skinny. How much did you weigh?”

“Ninety-four pounds.”

Jim raises his eyebrows. “Fuck you.”

“I’m not kidding. Bucky,” he says, addressing him as he appears, one arm supporting Gabe with ease, “Tell them how skinny I was.”

Bucky’s smile is dazzling. It’s him who ought to be catching the lady’s eye; God knows he can charm these French girls, with their red, red lips and their European glamour. He can charm anyone. “Real skinny. Real, real skinny. And fragile too, like he might break if you sneezed around him.” He holds his hands apart, fingers spread in the half-gloom. It’s obvious to Steve, although maybe not to the others, that he’s imagining his hands stretched to steady a fragile, bird-like body. After a long beat, he looks up. “Why?”

“Cap here was pretending he wasn’t a ladies man.”

Bucky says nothing, not at first. He has their attention, and he’s in no rush to surrender it. They eat it up, too. They lean forward and wait for him to prophesy, halfway out of their chairs as they await revelation.

He ignores them, looks at Steve. “The lady doth protest too much.”

Frenchie swears. In a too-loud voice, Gabe says, “No way!” and everyone laughs. “I call bullshit.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, not yet annoyed, but warming up to it.

“Hey, I’m just telling them like it happened.” At the head of the table, Bucky sips his beer and smiles at him, all teeth. “You had dates. It was your big blue eyes that did it for ‘em. Maybe you weren’t fighting them off with a stick like some of us, but Stevie got around plenty.”

“I never _got around_.”

They’re laughing at him. Adjacent, really. They’re laughing at Bucky, at Bucky’s clever phrasing and easy, winning smile. “I knew it. Knew you were too handsome to pass up,” Dugan says. He reaches to smack his meaty hand against Steve’s shoulder. Somehow Steve feels each finger land, individual and distinct.

“Oh, he was handsome.” Bucky says this while looking like a movie star. Even after a day spent fighting for his life, Bucky’s hair is obliging enough to curl over his forehead. Just there, just so. “You know, some of your more stuck-up girls would overlook him, waltz right past, but plenty of them knew when they had a good thing on their hands.”

When Steve flushes, it stings like sweat in a wound. Kinda like the feeling he got when one of those beautiful girls looked at him like dirt. Like an amoeba. Like he was Bucky Barnes’ kid brother and no amount of Christian charity could make him worth their time.

“Non! A good thing? Not the capitaine, surely?”

“A good time, more like.”

“Was he a good time, kid?”

Bucky laughs, and his white throat is visible through his open collar. “‘Course he was.” He leans forward, til his dog tags clink against the table. “I taught him everything he knows.”

That makes them explode laughing, banging their heavy-bottomed glasses against the table. They hiccup and punch each other in the arms and generally enjoy the hell out of the idea. Of course, to someone who survived Bucky’s earnest, rambling, advisory lectures, it’s not funny. It’s not fucking funny at all.

Burning up from indignation and embarrassment, he doesn’t say anything. He just sits there, hand tight around his beer glass, watching Bucky smirk and preen, anger boiling in his stomach.

Here’s a problem that nobody warned him about, before he got strong: he has to be careful now. Once, before Erskine and the future and the strange new skin they built for him, he broke Bucky’s jaw. Only once. Bucky had been sniping at him, taunting him, and Steve’s anger got the better of him, and _bam_ , he splintered Bucky’s jaw like sugar-glass. That was when he was little. Now, with his science-lab biceps, he could probably knock Bucky’s head off his shoulders.

Sorely tempted though he is, he keeps himself under control. “Buck.”

Switching his attention away from his adoring fans, Bucky does—finally—gain some perspective. His smile falls off and his mouth falls open, surprise all over his face. God, Steve could just _kill_ him.

Chastened, Bucky turns and says, “Alright, that’s enough.” They ignore him. They’re still wheezing out their laughter; Jim’s dribbling beer out his nose. Bucky, hasty and remorseful, pinches Jim on the arm, making him choke instead. “Not like _you_ were doing any better before the war, were you, Jim?”

“I did fine,” Jim protests, rubbing at his forearm.

“See, that’s how I’m quite sure you didn’t teach him,” Monty says, eyes bright, “Because if _you_ taught him, he’d never speak to women at all.”

At first, Bucky’s mouth is open, ready to retort, but then he realizes what’s been said about him. And he does _not_ like it. “Hey, I speak to women! They speak back, even!”

“No you don’t,” Dum-Dum laughs. “You’re a hermit.” He knocks him with his massive bulk. Bucky allows himself to be knocked, mouth turned down and sulky.

“A monk!”

“You’re about to be a dead man, Jones,” he snaps, “And don’t think I don’t hear what you’re saying about me, Frenchie, I ain’t stupid.”

Dernier collapses into his beer stein, hiccupping with glee. No one is impressed by Bucky, despite the fire rising on his cheeks. Good, Steve thinks savagely, still actively _not-_ breaking the fragile glass in his hands. Let him experience a little group humiliation.

Before Bucky can get truly riled, though, Dum-Dum punches him in the side. “At ease, sergeant. What did I hear about the lady doth protesting too much?”

He isn’t mollified, not really—he’s still blushing furiously, although at what, Steve doesn’t know. But he listens to Dum-Dum. He doesn’t listen like that to Steve. “Alright,” he says, swigging his beer with an injured nobility that makes them laugh harder, “I see what this is. A mutiny. And they got you in on it, too, Dum-Dum? I’m ashamed of you.”

Jim snorts. “Whatever, kid. We see through you like a window-blind.”

The conversation shifts. A drunken soldier bumps into their table and Monty says something unbearably British, something they parrot back at him. Since it doesn’t concern Steve, he seizes his chance to escape. Empty glass in hand, he says, “Beer.” Nobody pays attention, already tuned to their new topic, all glib obliviousness drowned in cheap beer.

Well. Bucky notices. His mouth is still turned down, twisting his bottom lip in dismay. Where he is, pinned between Jim’s arm around him and the solid bulk of Dugan to his right, there’s no easy to disengage and follow. And Steve knows that; he was counting on it.

The crush of bodies at the bar opens easily for him. It’s partly the bars on the uniform, but it’s also the myth. The legend dispels almost as much air as the muscles and bone, and it cuts through a crowd like a knife through butter. Merely leaning in gets the barmaid’s attention. “Scotch,” he asks, and she answers.

Speaking of knives through butter. The alcohol slips down his throat without resistance, settling in his stomach like a stone. It’s pleasant, though. He used to get drunk off half a beer. Now he can drink for hours and not feel it. He can down barrels and not feel it. He wonders, vaguely, what he’d have to do to feel it.

It could be nice, though. To get drunk off a glass of weak beer, he reflects, watching the raven-woman watch him. She _is_ watching him now, her gaze a cool weight against his heated skin. Nominally she’s letting a moon-faced GI talk her ear off, but she’s looking at him. The alcohol in his belly just sits there, warm but inactive. No liquid courage rises to his aid.

Through lidded eyes, she keeps right on staring at him. Her head tilts. It could be a question—could be she’s leaning in to hear her suitor more clearly. Steve raises his glass, half-mocking, in salute. He isn’t going home with her. Not tonight.

He drinks a while. Mostly, he bides his time. Bucky’s gotta turn up sometime.

Eventually, she grows bored with the chubby naïf and sends him away. Steve avoids her attempt to draw in his eye one last time. Something about her—her coiled hair or her sultry eyes—strikes him as calculated. She’s on the prowl, and this is just her uniform. Young, and beautiful, she’s seen a dozen armies go marching by. All a foreign soldier can possibly give her is a night together, and a night is never very long.

He doesn’t begrudge her. But it seems a lonely way to live.

“ _There_ you are,” says a voice at his elbow. Before he turns to face Bucky’s pious apologies, he watches the raven-woman get swept away by someone else. He hopes she has a better night than he’s having.

Bucky worms his way between drunk patrons who barely notice him. And yes, his expression is pious and hang-dog and somehow sarcastic despite it all, that complex web of emotions he wears when he fucks up. Instead of engaging, Steve props his elbow on the bar. He raises one eyebrow.

“Steve, I don’t know what it is that I said… but I know I said something,” Bucky says, hands in his pockets. There’s no space for them to be anywhere else.

Shaking his head, Steve says, “You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“I had an inkling, yeah.” He presses closer, body diagonal off Steve’s hip, near enough to speak directly to him. He smells like beer, but like it’s on his clothes, not on his breath. “I mean it. I don’t know what I said. You had lots of girls. Frances Tierney, she practically lived on the landing, waiting for you to sweep her off her feet. I swear I wasn’t making fun of you.”

There’s no room to get away from Bucky, not even any room to look him in the eye. This is good, because Steve couldn’t say this to Bucky’s face. “You didn’t teach me a damn thing. You just gave me advice until I wanted to kill myself.”

Bucky pauses. His mouth is inches from Steve’s ear. Steve can hear him breathing, even over the din of every other person in the bar. He says, “I taught you a few things.”

“I’d worked most of it out on my own by then.” By excruciating trial and error. Death by a thousand humiliating cuts. Sure, he’d known lots of things before Bucky got on his knees to teach him. He didn’t know how it was going to feel. Which is fine, because Bucky didn't know, never even suspected, the truth that Steve was hiding from him. That makes them even.

Laughing softly, Bucky is only centimeters away. Less than that. Close enough that Steve swears he can hears his heart beating. “Well, I helped you practice. I know there were never any complaints from me.”

His Scotch topples over. It bangs against the bar with a solid thud, and everyone looks over at him. Steve and the barmaid get in each other’s way trying to rescue the glass. That only makes him more irritated. “Would you shut your mouth?” he hisses. His hands are wet and he’s angry again.

There’s now a respectable distance between their bodies. It could be because people have stepped back. Apologetic, Bucky says, “Sorry, Steve. It’s the liquor.”

“You’re not drunk, you dope.”

“Well, I’m tired, and the surgeon-general says that’s dangerous too, you know.” He flutters his eyelashes. Steve’s worn-thin temper frays, and he shoves him away. Not hard, but hard enough to make his point.

“I’m gonna kick your ass from here to London, and _then_ you’re gonna be tired.” The look on Bucky’s face is somewhere between shocked and expressionless, like he forgot to be implacable a beat too late. Something inside Steve softens, but only marginally. He lets the anger out of his voice a little and says, “Go keep an eye on Gabe, he’s gonna throw up.”

It comes out more weary than he intended. Just like that, he needs another drink. Bucky doesn’t move, standing right where Steve put him, uniform sloppy and that curl like a crescent moon over his forehead. He’s so handsome, and nobody even put him through an industrial furnace to get him that way.  

He’s waiting for Steve. Even though Steve shoved him. “You coming?” he says, sounding subdued.

He signals for another whiskey. He doesn’t have the energy to deal with Bucky right now. He waves his hand. “Later.”

“Steve—”

“Go.” For once, he isn’t fucking around.

Bucky gets the hint, and he goes.

 

 

The major he’s been speaking with is pointing out which units are which and who’s been where. “They started in Italy, if you can believe it. Not that a one of them could find Anzio on a map,” he says.

“Ah,” Steve says. Could _he_ find Anzio on a map? Also, he has no idea what unit they’re talking about. An armored division, bigger than the 107 th and full to bursting with trucks and guns and machines, is camped in the village. They were here before Steve and the Commandos, so this is technically their base. Because it’s their base and the major outranks him, Steve has to listen to him blither on, droning about every unit’s insignia and full military history.

His mind is on other things. It is impossible to be morose on a bright autumn day in France, but damn it if his brain isn’t trying. The more he turns over last night’s conversation, the more he feels like a jerk. Bucky tried to be nice to him. Even if his olive branch felt an awful lot like a joke, it was an overture.

“You’ll notice that that group there,” the major says, pointing to a random patch of drab tents, indistinguishable from the other drab tents, “Was actually in Egypt for a few months! I imagine they must have quite some stories from their time there!”

“Undoubtedly.” Steve’s brain is half on Bucky, half on the sunshine, nowhere near Egypt.

The wind is blowing from the north, for a change, carrying away the scent of gunpowder and churned earth; in its wake, the air is full of the scent of petrichor. It’s only been a few weeks that they’ve been back in France, but the sun beating down outside the officers’ mess is so warm, so gentle it makes him wish that they could stay. It’s a new wish, selfish yet banal. Normally, if he’s bothering to hope, he sticks to the basics: for him and Bucky, and the rest of their friends, to make it out alive.

“Sergeant Dugan,” says the major, and Steve finally snaps free of his reverie. Dum-Dum, not here and then here moments later, snaps off a salute to the major. Both he and Steve return it, the major crisply and Steve less so. “What can I do for you, sergeant?”

“Excuse me, sir. I need to speak with Captain Rogers for a moment. If you’re available, sir…?”

He is more than available. He longs to be free of the squat, irrepressibly cheerful major. He nods urgently, and Dum-Dum leads them down a sidestreet of more grey canvas tents.

Steve doesn’t exhale until they’re safely yards away. The sun-drenched air tastes even sweeter without incessant lecturing pulsing through it, and he breathes deeply. “Thanks, Dum-Dum.”

“Don’t mention it.”

His smile makes his mustache twitch. The sun doesn’t agree with Dum-Dum; it makes him tomato-colored and sweaty. Still, he bears it well, keeping pace with Steve as they wander through the maze of tents.

“You looked like you needed some way to escape,” he says. Steve nods. He’d been speaking to General Chandler at dinner but had been foisted on the major. He’d been so bored his brain seems to have dribbled out his ear.

“He must have told me where every unit had ever been deployed. I think he knows what college they all went to, too. He just wouldn’t shut up about it.”

Dum-Dum laughs, and it’s easy. But there’s a frisson of tension in the carriage of his shoulders and the way he walks, gaze facing forward and not at Steve. There’s something Dum-Dum wants to say, but isn’t saying.

Steve doesn’t pry. It’s not his way. When he was small, his silence bred contempt or dismissal; now, people feel the need to answer him. Dugan is no different. In no time at all, he cracks. “Captain,” he says, looking at the ground, “There’s no way to be delicate about this, but…”

“Spit it out, Dum-Dum.”

Dum-Dum clears his throat. “Me and the boys, we don’t misinterpret things. We certainly don’t take the kid too seriously.”

Ah. It’s about Bucky, because of course it is. Spine straight and shoulders back, he focuses on being casual, blasé. “Okay.”

“He knows he pissed you off.”

For a few beats, he lets that sentence roll off his back like water. Enlisted men, guys he doesn’t know, snap off brisk salutes when they see them coming down the path. Steve struggles to find words. “I’m not angry at him,” he says.

“Oh.” Dum-Dum shrugs. “Well. Alright.”

It didn’t fully roll off. It’s lodged in between his shoulderblades, a prickling itch that he can’t quite reach. “What’s this about?”

Another shrug. “Maybe it’s not my place, sir, but… he isn’t sleeping.”

“Well, not right now,” Steve says, perplexed.

Dum-Dum shrugs again, but his mouth is pinched, unhappy. At Steve? At _Bucky?_ “I mean it, sir. He doesn’t sleep much, even when we’re in camp.”

Quick bile in his throat. “How much? Shit, Dum-Dum.” He puts his hands on his face. They are all tired, tired beyond _belief_ , but more than that, enough to make Dugan worry? “I’ve been putting him at sentry.”

“Not like that,” he insists. “He’s tired but he wouldn’t put a one of us in any danger. He’d rip his own arms off before he’d do something like that.”

After a beat, Steve lowers his hands. The panic in his throat recedes. Of course. Of course this is just Dum-Dum gently interceding on Bucky’s behalf. His faith in the universe is restored. “You’re being too soft on him.”

“Maybe. He’s got a big mouth, sir, but he don’t have a bad thought in his body.”

He cracks a smile. “Now I _know_ you’re being too soft on him.”

Dum-Dum grins too, but it’s different. It’s not for him. His smile is that fond smile they all get when Bucky does something they like, something clever or generous or impressively stupid. That smile that reminds Steve that Bucky is not his, not entirely.

He realizes where they’re going when he hears their voices, humming and buzzing a couple yards away. Dum-Dum has led him to the other Commandos. Their voices round the corner long before they do. They’re laughing, Dernier and Gabe speaking in rapid-fire French; Steve hears _bastard_ and _hot_ and _dying_. It must have been intentional, Dum-Dum taking him here, but his specific intention is unclear.

Steve says nothing, and neither does Dum-Dum. Jim does. Jim calls “Hey, Captain!” and waves, beckoning them over.

Smiling tolerantly, Steve meets them in the path. They look hot and sweaty, yet strangely jubilant, as if they don’t mind that they spent the day toiling in the sun. “Look like you’ve been pretty busy.”

“We were,” Monty says, gesturing to their clothes and sweaty faces.

“You have a nice day behind a desk?” Gabe asks slyly.

“Well, someone has to guard the mess hall, you know?”

He spends a lot of time in the mess hall. He wishes he didn’t, but it takes a lot of food to keep him fed. And it’s easier to make a joke out of it than wait for someone else to laugh first.

He looks at Dum-Dum, who’s looking at Bucky, who’s looking at the ground. He doesn’t quite know what to do with this information. He puts his hands in his pockets instead and drags his tongue against the ridges of his teeth. It’s impossible to feel at home in his skin when Bucky’s purposefully looking away from him.

The boys are going to check the mail truck for deliveries. Steve agrees to go along, but he doesn’t rush about it. And he’s not really surprised when Bucky, also, doesn’t rush.

He lets the others pull in front before he exhales the uneasy breath he’s been holding in his chest. “Hey Buck.”

He looks at Steve, watchful, lean like a cat under his muddy uniform. There’s mud flecked up his pants, almost to his knees, and a dirty smudge on his throat. He, like all the other enlisted, spent the afternoon helping dig out the armored division while Steve sat in briefings. Even though Steve’s the one built like a carnival strongman, they sent Bucky to go slave under the hot sun.

The Army has a terrible sense of humor.

It takes Bucky a minute to process that Steve isn’t going to yell at him. When he does, he grins. “Hey, Steve.”

“Your mother was telling me to go easy on you just then.”

“My mother? My—oh.” He wrinkles his nose. The sunlight makes him impossibly young, like a magic trick, smoothing out the tired lines around his eyes and lighting up his skin. The best part of the magic is Bucky’s crooked, helpless smile. “You mean Dugan. Jesus, Steve. I don’t put him up to it, you know I don’t.”

“Well, as a fellow non-commissioned, you ought to put a stop to it.”

His eyes narrow. He chooses to take it as a joke, which is lucky, since that’s how Steve meant it. “Kiss my ass, sir,” he says, diction sharp and expression unimpressed. Or humorous. Some magical combination of both that sparks a thousand memories in Steve’s mind.

He punches Bucky in the arm and says, “Duly noted, sergeant.”

 _That_ ’ _s_ an olive branch. That’s the kind of behavior the two of them are used to. Sniping at each other and being sarcastic. “Okay.”

He smiles at him like an idiot, and Bucky smiles back. Something in Steve’s chest unfurls. Even before he realized the truth, it was always easier to breathe when Bucky was alright with him. Still is. He wonders if Bucky feels the same, but he’s never gone out of his way to answer that question. He’s always been wary of what he’d find.

“You been sleeping okay, Buck?”

“I sleep fine,” he says. Steve can’t tell if he’s lying, because one of the boys is already returning with his mail. Sure enough, Bucky’s expression changes as he approaches. “Hey, Gabe.”

Gabe’s got a clutch of letters in his fist, hot off the mail truck and safe in his arms. His salute comes with a blue-hulled envelope in his hand, the tidily elaborate address label written in an unmistakably feminine hand. “Hey sarge. Cap. Good haul today.”

Nodding at the envelope, Bucky says, “Who’s the letter from?”

“My mama.” He rolls his eyes with affection. “Probably badgering me to write more.”

“Well, Gabe,” Bucky says, grinning, “Seems like you ought to write your poor old mother more.”

“Is that an order, sarge?”

His eyes wide as silver dollars, Bucky flutters his lashes like a flirt. “Who me? Order _you_?”

Gabe smile speaks volumes; the unspoken _yes, you_ needs no words. While Bucky’s still laughing, Gabe pops off a salute, heading back towards their side of camp. “Sarge. Captain.” His blue envelope dances merrily between his fingers as he goes.

Steve waits until Gabe rounds the corner to say, not unhappily, “They like you better than they like me.”

He doesn’t take it personally. They’ve known Bucky a lot longer, and Azzano forged them through fire. Or so Steve suspects—they don’t ever speak of it. And when they go to dig tanks out of the mud, it’s Bucky, not Steve, who goes with them.

Bucky shrugs. “You’re the squad leader. You tell ‘em to like you, they’ll do it.”

“Doesn’t seem right.” They follow the path that Gabe took, passing closer to where 3rd division is hard at work, even this late in the day. It’s a busy hive of activity, one that has nothing to do with Steve. Unnoticed and unneeded, he can stick to the margins and just watch the thing transpire.

They stand shoulder-to-shoulder or, rather, Steve’s shoulder to the hollow of Bucky’s throat. The two or three inches he has on Bucky gives him a clear view of the camp disassembling itself. He shades his eyes from the slanting sun and watches the chaos. Trucks honk at one another, men march in precise, orderly lines. The Commandos will be on the move again soon, too. They told him as much in his briefing today. The raven-woman in the bar will have new recruits to sing to for her supper.

“Everybody else in the world likes you better than me,” Bucky continues, squinting at the chaos below. It’s a fantastic lie uttered with a straight face. No one who’s actually met the both of them prefers Steve, except maybe the SSR, who want to use him.  “Captain America and his merry men. No mention of Bucky Barnes, hapless sidekick. Christ, my own mother prefers you. She doesn’t seem to remember hating you the last twenty-five years, but you know my ma.”

“She does not.” Winifred Barnes openly referred to Steve as the devil. Like Bucky, she is a lifetime holder of grudges, all of his temper and easily affronted pride, none of his redeeming qualities. Steve can’t imagine her _liking_ him, let alone preferring him to her perfect, beloved son.

“Does so. Just last week she sent me a four page letter, three pages of which is about you and your brilliant heroics.” Disgusted, he frowns as he mops at his forehead, smearing the dirt further across his face. “The rest is her heckling me to write more.”

Smirking, Steve says, “Seems like you ought to write your poor mother more.”

“Well,” Bucky says, and he turns to look at Steve face-on, “Tell me to do it, and I’ll do it.”

Steve has to look away. Luckily the armored division is making a hell of a lot of noise, tossing things into trucks with no discipline and lots of banging. They both watch for a little while as Steve tries to get his heartrate under control.

Someone drives a Jeep down the path they were standing in. They book it, double-time, away from the tents, back towards the houses they’ve requisitioned. “We should play cards or something tonight,” Steve says as they walk along in the soft, sloshy mud. The undersides of Bucky’s wrists are pale-white, unsullied, desperately wanting for someone to bruise a little color into them. Steve tries to squash that thought away. It’s a little too close to the truth for comfort. “After you write a letter to your dear mother, I mean.”

“No fucking way. You cheat.”

Laughing, Steve claps an arm around Bucky’s shoulder, although he makes sure to let go sooner than he’d like. “You shouldn’t have taught me how.”

 

 

It’s an open secret that Bucky is good at cards. Technically, they’re not supposed to be gambling, and Steve’s definitely not supposed to be gambling _with_ his enlisted men. But it’s an empty rule, unenforced and largely unenforceable. He reflects on this sourly when he loses and has to pay up his last Hershey’s bar, the one he’s kept in his coat pocket since Coventry four months ago.

Bucky eats it in front of him, the shit.

He is good, and Steve knows that. He knew it when he suggested the game. When Bucky worked at the docks, the Italians used to play poker against the Irish. Some dumb honor thing that Bucky got roped into. Bucky was good enough to win but smart enough not to win too much, which kept either side from grinding his face into the concrete. He taught Steve every trick he knows, including how to cheat. Sure, Steve cheats, but Bucky cheats much better.

It’s not just Steve who keeps letting Bucky screw him. He hustles anyone who’ll let themselves be hustled. Tuesday, a week after they staggered into camp from their last mission, Bucky’s nowhere to be found, off in some vague place playing cards with Jim. That’s what Monty says with a shrug when Steve asks him.

“Jim’s gonna lose all his cigarettes,” Steve says, frowning.

“Didn’t _you_ lose all your cigarettes, Cap?” Monty asks pointedly.

Steve calls him a rat-fink bastard and goes to find Bucky.

He circles the empty camp, looking for Bucky. Third division has long-since departed, leaving the camp a hollow crater and the men left behind occupying far too large a space. Bucky and Jim have diffused into what was the CO’s dining room and is now, once again, a French church hall. As Steve arrives, Bucky is counting cigarettes over a heap of discarded cards. His rampage continues.

“Fucking A,” Steve comments, leaning on the back of Bucky’s chair. Bucky smiles and lights one of his prizes, sticking it between his teeth. “How do you always do that?”

“He’s got a great poker face,” Jim says. Instead of being dismayed at losing so badly, he gathers up the cards and starts to deal another round. Sucker, Steve thinks. “You just can’t tell what the kid’s thinking.”

“That’s why I always beat _you_ ,” Bucky says, addressing Steve and offering him a drag. Steve takes it. Back when he was a cripple, he used to smoke asthma cigarettes. He doesn’t any more, but the inhale and exhale is soothing, even if it irritates his perfect lungs. “You’ve got a face like an open book. I can always tell all your secrets.”

Steve smiles tolerantly. He knows for a fact that there’s one secret Bucky doesn’t know. Bucky doesn’t even suspect the truth. “Got a mission.”

Frowning, Bucky takes his cigarette back. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Tough. Wasn’t it you who said something about following Captain America into the jaws of death?” Leaning forward on his elbows, he watches Bucky and Jim draw cards and place bets. There is, he’s sure, a bible verse about gambling in churches.

Snorting, Bucky finally calls Jim’s raise. It’s his confidence that always gets Steve, the way he plays a bum hand the same way as a royal flush. “Pretty sure that’s exactly what I said I _wouldn’t_ do,” he says.

“Either way, pal, I’m the boss.”

Jim hums smugly. Slapping down three winking Jacks, he says, “What else is new, sir?”

Bucky, who’s only holding two pair, swears explosively until the church rafters ring with profanity. “ _Fuck_ you, Jim.”

With relish, Jim helps himself to all the cigarettes in the pot, sixteen in all. “Gee, sarge, ask me nicely.”

The cigarettes disappear into his breast pocket, and he zips his jacket shut with glee dripping from his pores. Bucky points a finger at him. “I’m gonna set you sprints if you don’t shut your mouth.”

“Easy, tiger,” Steve says, his arm on Bucky’s shoulder. “Don’t you want to hear about the mission?”

Bucky shakes his head as he ashes his cigarette. “But tell me anyway.”

“Assault. At night. Fifteen kliks west of Belfort.” He steals the cigarette from Bucky’s fingers, ignoring his protests, and inhales until his lungs are full. He didn’t mind the asthma cigarettes so bad. It was the liver juice he really hated, although even that was comforting in its raw, slimy ugliness.

When Steve holds the cigarette back out to him, he takes it, looking grumpy. But that could be the cigarette or the mission or Jim winning. “I don’t know where the fuck that is.”

Neither did Steve, until Phillips called and told him about it. It’s not that kind of mission. “Jim, go away for a while. I gotta beat this into Bucky’s head.”

Mostly, he wants Jim’s chair, but he also wants to have Bucky to himself. Jim doesn’t seem to mind either way, tapping his pocket where his bounty is stored and bowing mockingly at Bucky.

“I was distracted!” Bucky hollers after him. “Steve distracted me!”

Jim laughs so loud it echoes off the church ceiling and all its stones. “I know you were!”

For a long minute, Bucky glares at him, even after he’s disappeared out the door. Only then does he relax. It’s not that he was angry, Steve realizes, settling into Jim’s vacant chair, only that he’s shedding that extra iron that lets him be a sergeant to his men.

With Steve, he can be just Bucky, which is how Steve likes him best.

“How are we getting there?”

“Walking, most likely.” The map they gave him is dense and clouded from water damage, but he’s able to trace a path with his finger. Bucky bends low over the document to follow it, too. “Maybe Stark’s people can hop us a little closer, but the Germans have fortifications here and here. Maybe anti-aircraft. We don’t want to get too close.”

“Raiding Krauts at night. Oh boy.”

Steve studies his profile, from the sweep of hair over his brow to the way he bites his lip. He’s concentrating, Steve knows, surveying the whorls of topography until he memorizes them.

Delicately, he asks, “You sleep okay, Bucky?”

Nodding, Bucky keeps tracking the route they’re meant to take. South of Bessoncourt and Fontaine. Deep, deep behind the lines. His fingers pave the path they’re going to take. Bucky never takes chances. That’s not the kind of person he is. “Yeah, I do alright. Easier without Jim’s snoring. Why?”

“Nothing. You look tired.”

“I am tired,” he says, sitting up straight. And he is, but somehow he wears it better than Steve does himself. He looks tired but he looks like Bucky, too. Steve doesn’t feel like himself under his exhaustion. “Remember my first week at the docks? I thought I’d never be more beat-up and spit-out than I was then. It doesn’t even compare. My blisters have blisters.”

Steve grins. “You are looking pretty scruffy, Buck.”

“I even got a sunburn. Look.”

He wriggles—it’s the only word for the way he twists his spine, pulling his shirt down over pink skin. And Lord, it _is_ burned. The smooth paleness of his white lower back has boiled, here, into angry redness. When Steve extends his finger, he doesn’t even have to touch to feel the heat radiating off him. He doesn’t, for a moment, content to linger, not quite touching. Not yet.

“Where?”

“Right here,” he says, contorting further, pressing his thumb into the burned skin. It flashes white and he hisses. Steve only meant _where were you,_ but now he has an excuse to follow Bucky’s hand and touch him, right at the top of his spine. He doesn’t hiss when Steve presses in; he allows it without comment, breathing slow and steady.

“Dummy,” Steve says. “I mean where were you when it happened?”

“Oh. It was Saturday, when Frenchie and I were out in the meadow south of camp. Fell asleep in the sun.”

“Dummy,” Steve says again, not knowing why. He leaves his fingers where they are, pushing into Bucky’s skin, urging it pink then white then dissolving into red again. When at last he peels himself away from Bucky’s back, he hopes the imprint of his fingerprints will linger, even just a little while.

“So what’s the point of the mission?” Bucky says, twisting back around. His shirt covers the acreage of red skin like it was never there.

“Well, there’s a guy. Captain Andreas Lienske.”

“Sounds German.”

“Good job,” he says dryly. “We have to capture him. Phillips thinks he might know something.”

“Everybody knows something. Hell, even I know something.”

Steve stomach tightens up with affection, like it’s being squeezed by a fist. “Well, you don’t know not to stay out of the goddamn sun.”

Bucky shrugs and folds his arms over his chest, the end of his cigarette held between his two fingers. He stubs it out against his boot. Maybe he couldn’t think of a good comeback. It pleases Steve, the idea that he’s finally shut Bucky up.

“Right. So we’ll leave the day after tomorrow, 0600, and march. That should put us around here by nightfall—”

“Steve?” He hovers his finger above the map, so when he raises his head, it looks like he’s pointing at Bucky. There’s a very strange expression on Bucky’s face. “Do you get sunburned?”

“I’m not dumb enough to lay out until I’m fried, you idiot.”

“No, I mean… since the procedure. It’s not my business.” With every word out of Bucky’s mouth, the affectionate squeeze in his stomach evaporates. In fact, his body seems to liquidate from the outside in. And Bucky isn’t even being cruel about it—he’s nervous. His spine is rigid, even as he sprawls in the chair, on edge. Why? “Only I just wondered… if you still get sunburned.”

He swallows hard. “Yeah. I guess I still get sunburns.”

Something like violent relief sweeps over Bucky; he goes from strung tight to collapsed, exhaling in a rush. “Oh good,” he says cryptically. “I just—I thought if I—”

He stops talking. Steve stares at him.

Bucky looks away.

Steve muscles up a tone that isn’t afraid. The trick is to keep his words light and even, skating over the ugly fear in his heart. “I still get sunburned. You worried or something?”

 _He’d_ been worried, after the machine.

Bucky won’t look back at him. His lips curl into a passable reproduction of a smile, but Steve knows him. “Not about you.”

With no clear retort for that, Steve reclines in Jim’s vacated chair, his long legs taking up all the space and then some. His knees nearly brush Bucky’s. His boots are under the slats of Bucky’s chair. They fail to touch in many almost-intersecting places.

“So,” Bucky says. He reaches for his deck of cards and makes the upturned numbers vanish back into his hand. The jacks still seem to be smirking at him. “Capture Lienske. Evacuate him? Get the hell out of dodge?”

He nods. “Get the hell out of dodge, double-time.”

“Okay.”

“It’ll be fine,” he says. He hands Bucky one of the cards that’s skittered too close to the edge of the table, just outside his reach. It’s a test, and it’s a mean-spirited one. Will Bucky recoil or flinch away from Steve’s hand? Will his throat open up and spill bile, the words that Steve’s been dreading since he’d let the SSR turn him into a stranger?

No—not today, anyway. His fingers are warm where they brush against Steve’s hand, and his smile is quick. It almost reaches his eyes. “I know,” he says. “I’m not worried, not one bit. We’ll capture Lienske and be back before they realize we’re gone.”

It is not that simple. It has never been that simple. But Bucky lets his legs fall open, one knee against Steve’s, an easy, sincere gesture that doesn’t require thinking. It’s a fraction of a touch, and Steve still falls upon it like a starving man.

“Okay,” Steve says. He smiles at Bucky. Bucky smiles at him.

Bucky flicks the ace of spades between his fingers, here, there, gone.

 

 

“I’m hot. My balls are sticking to my goddamn leg,” Jim announces. Steve doesn’t look back, too busy scanning the road ahead for danger, but he cracks a smile anyway.

As bad as the heat is, the grass is worse. It’s wet and clings to the bare skin at the tops of their socks. Only Monty, whose socks nearly reach his kneecaps, is immune. They take a few steps and then someone kicks out their leg, rustling creeping leaves off their skin. Steve thinks longingly of the civilian digs he left back in Lyon. It wasn’t this godforsaken hot in Lyon. Isn’t it supposed to be autumn in the mountain highlands?

“We’re all hot. Quit whining about it.” They’re also well beyond the lines, so Gabe is forced to speak in low tones, even though there’s no one around, hasn’t been all day.

“Remember Africa? _That_ was hot.”

“Not all of us were there, remember, dumb-ass?”

“Tais-toi! Nous sommes tous chaud, nous sommes tous fatigués,” spits Dernier harshly, from Steve’s left. He is exceptionally miserable in the humid autumn of southern France. Lille is apparently a long way from Belfort, and a good deal less humid.

“English please?”

“He said shut up,” says Bucky helpfully.

“Gee, thanks sarge.”

Steve pulls up, halting their advance. About a quarter mile back, maybe less, sits a stone house, thrusting up out of the trees like a fairy tale cottage. A witch’s cottage, more like: the windows are black abysses peering out into the abandoned wood. There’s no sign of movement, no sign of life in the lonely building, but Steve doesn’t take chances. “Someone needs to go check that farmhouse. Volunteers?”

The boys look at the ground suddenly, having somehow exhausted things to talk about. It’s Bucky who volunteers, rolling his eyes. “I’ll go. Frenchie, you’re with me.”

Dernier’s face is miserable, even more hangdog than usual, but Bucky doesn’t even seem to notice, much less budge. If anything, Bucky seems eager, heading off before Dernier’s ready, forcing him to scramble after. The two of them slink off into the trees. They are quickly swallowed by hedges and briars that grow almost over their heads.

Sopping at his forehead with his sleeve, he listens for trouble and ignores the others quietly bitching about the temperature. They left at 0600, and they joked around until noon. At noon the heat turned oppressive, squashing them down into their boots and drying them out. The HYDRA outpost is still a day’s march away, maybe a little less. Even Steve’s feet are blistered and nerves frayed. The men complain less than they ought to.

A wood-dove coos from the safety of the canopy overhead. Ahead of them, in the underbrush, they hear a small commotion. Steve’s heartbeat flares, but it’s only Frenchie swearing.

The boys snort. Even Dum-Dum rolls his eyes a little, although only at Steve, careful not to let the other men see him. “Someday soon, Dernier’s going to shoot some innocent Bavarian peasant with that itchy trigger finger of his,” Monty observes.

“No way,” Gabe says. “That’s why the kid’s always in point.”

At that, Steve turns his head. Everyone’s agreeing, nodding along, accepting this wisdom without scrutiny. “Why do you call him ‘kid’?”

Gabe becomes guarded, raising his hands as if to ward off offense. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“No, I was just curious,” Steve says. He is curious. At least, that’s the easiest of his emotions, the one floating closest to the surface. It’s curious that they call him _the kid_ , and it’s curious that Bucky allows it to stand.

“He’s the youngest, I guess.”

“I’m younger than him.” They look at him with open surprise, not bothering to hide it. Steve feels slighted somehow, offended in some way he can’t name. “I am,” he insists.

Jim asks, “No shit?”

Beyond them, a crash, a contemptuously obvious crash; clearly, no one’s around. Otherwise Bucky and Dernier would not have stomped through the undergrowth, snapping branches underfoot. Bucky shrugs as he approaches, pistol lax by his hip. “Emptied. Not Nazis, at least I don’t think so. It looked pretty picked over, but seems like the owner just up and left. We could camp.”

“Solid line of sight?” Steve says, watching a bead of sweat roll beneath Bucky’s collar.

“For at least a mile or two.”

“Can it be defended?”

Bucky looks to Dernier, whose pack of explosives has to last them through tonight and tomorrow’s raid. He shrugs his shoulders. “For a while.”

That makes it easy. “Alright,” Steve says, a knot of unease releasing in his chest. Storm clouds have been creeping over the eastern horizon all evening; he prefers to solve problems before they arise. “Let’s sleep under a roof tonight, boys.”

They whoop—or Jim and Dum-Dum do. Gabe and Dernier whistle through their teeth, which must be a French thing, and Monty smiles patiently; maybe cheering aloud is against some British nobility code. Bucky, who’s standing next to Dernier, turns away and makes a face at Steve at the volume of their whistling. It’s a good-humored expression, the kind that makes Bucky so open and likeable. Despite himself, Steve ends up smiling back at him in a foolish, besotted kind of way.

They march through the shrubs again, the sun slithering behind the trees as they march. The closer they get, the more the forest thins, although never enough to form a trail. The house sits on a narrow peninsula of cleared ground, surrounded on three sides by trees. Far beyond it, a cart track cuts a dusty swath through abandoned fields. Somewhere, it must rejoin the road to Belfort.

As they approach, the house begins to look more familiar, less threatening, even as night falls around them. The windows, although shuttered, have been preserved with care; the door and exterior walls are in good shape. It seems to have been voluntarily abandoned. It takes Dugan’s trench-knife and Steve’s strength to pry the nailed-shut door off its hinges, but inside, the house is clean, well-maintained—and empty.

“Did they just clear out and leave?” Gabe asks, although the answer is obvious. People move. Sometimes it doesn’t even have anything to do with war. The main body of the Allied advance is miles away, months away.

Spreading out, they pick through the rooms. The heavier furniture has been left, but anything small has been taken. They light a lamp to see through the heavy darkness and go through each room. It’s when they reach the second floor they find it.

“Christ Jesus!”

“That’s not—”

“Mattresses.” Jim flops, bodily, arms outflung and landing on a soft pile of mattresses. The tower collapses, some sliding forward and some sliding back, pitching him onto the floor again. Nonetheless, he beams. “Boys, I’m in heaven.”

Steve laughs, helpless in the face of it. _Mattresses_. Heavy mattresses, shoved unceremoniously in the back bedroom. Good quality, better than anything Steve slept on before the SSR got hold of him, and here they are, waiting for Steve in the darkness like Aladdin’s magic lamp.

“If I gotta share with Morita, I swear to god I’ll mutiny.”

“Shut up, Gabe.” Dum-Dum’s already pulling the pile apart, lining them up, admiring the compactness of the straw. He, like all of them, is already dreaming of sleeping peacefully for once. “Morita only kicks occasionally.”

“Well, who’s sharing? Because I am _not_ sleeping on the floor.” There’s only four; Steve can see that now. Still, four is more than they ever have on missions, and the unlikely presence of mattresses at all has filled Steve with a pleasant, buoyant hope.

“Someone has to be up on watch,” he points out. Gabe’s expression mellows, but only slightly. No one wants to forfeit sleeping on mattresses for a cold four hour watch. “And there’s gotta be another bedroom around here. You coming, Buck?”

He’s startled—his shoulders jerk as he realizes that Steve’s singled him out, asked him along. Steve shouldn’t do it, shouldn’t set apart one of his NCOs for special treatment, but it’s different. It’s obviously different between them. Nodding, Bucky acquiesces, and Steve smiles.

“Pays to be a sergeant, I see,” Jim says slyly. Bucky punches him in the shoulder.

“Eat me, Jim.”

That’s different too. Bucky lets them talk a little shit to him; Bucky lets them call him ‘kid.’ And he lets Steve give him special treatment, single him out and steer him out the door. If there’s no other mattresses in the house, Steve will feel pretty stupid sleeping on the floor all night, but it’s a risk he’s willing to take. He’d rather lie on the bare floorboards if it meant stealing a couple of hours with Bucky.

Before he steps out of the room, he catches Dum-Dum’s gaze pointedly, nodding at him in the dim light, as if to say, you’re in charge. Dum-Dum doesn’t say anything. Good. If he’d complained, Steve might have had to backtrack, treat Bucky the same, and lose his chance to get Bucky to himself.

The other hallway doors are closets, junkroom, closets, and finally, another bedroom. “Guess this is officer’s quarters.” To light the space, Bucky lifts his lantern high above his head, throwing a pool of light over the room. They both nearly jump out of their _skins_ , but the flurry of motion on the far wall is just peeling wallpaper, fluttering and rustling to itself. Somehow, he ended up a lot closer to Bucky in the confusion.

He can feel the heat of Bucky’s body through the cool, close air like a knife.

Clearing his throat, he steps farther into the room, away from temptation. “Looks that way.”

When Bucky lifts the lantern again, the light falls onto a miracle. On top of a heavy oak bedframe lies the crème de la crème of mattresses, the Ingrid Bergman of mattresses. It’s as big as a double-door and full, like it’s just been stuffed. Amazed, Steve stumbles forward, pressing his hand into the blankets and yanking it back like it’s been burnt. “Jesus, Buck—it’s feathers.”

Swearing softly, Bucky stutters forward a half-step. “You pulling my leg, Steve?”

“No. Sweet Christ, it’s a featherbed.” Once or twice, in Manhattan and Kent, the SSR had put him up in nice rooms with featherticks, so buttery-soft and warm that he slept soundly, even though his body was still a strange untamed beast. He didn’t know he could miss something he’d only had twice. “You gotta feel this.”

“This is—oh my god. Oh my god.” One corner of the featherbed is badly ripped, with musty down pushing up through the ticking like snowdrops; stains, grayish in the dim light, form a fist-sized blotch in the middle. But the SSR never put Bucky up nice, and he doesn’t see the imperfections. He presses one finger into the silky whiteness with reverence.

Steve sits on it. It’s heavenly. Maybe it could be shook out a little, but who cares? After a moment, Bucky crawls up after him. He’s hesitant, like maybe he’ll spoil it, but he presses on and ends up sitting snug by Steve. The bed’s so massive that there’s space for both of them, albeit with precious few inches to spare. Steve lies down. Feet dangling off the edge of the bed, Bucky remains upright, the lantern throwing flickering shadows along the side of his face.

 The vertebrae in Steve’s spine sing with joy as the tension he’s been carrying releases. He stretches every muscle in his back and kicks off his boots. “You think the Krauts coulda booby-trapped this place?”

“Who cares? I’ll die comfortable.”

Ignoring that remark, Steve sits up again to rub the lingering itch of grass off his ankles. Bucky watches him without turning. “Well, maybe they just had bed bugs and thought they were better off without ‘em.”

His response is a snort, a shake of his head. He puts the lantern on the ground, and then Steve just has to remember what he looks like: all his features, all the little details, are blunted in the darkness.

That’s okay, though. Bucky’s written in him like a faulty gene.

In silence, they sit for several minutes. The Commandos are quiet in the other room, no sounds or commotion. Even the air outside is still. It’s only just past nightfall. It isn’t as late as it feels in the cool darkness of the bedroom.

This room must have been the master bedroom, the featherbed and good straw mattress reserved for the head of the house. And his wife. It might have been their marriage bed. Steve feels an unspeakable longing, the same one he felt a lifetime ago in Brooklyn.

This could be a home.

Sighing, Bucky breaks first. “I should take the first watch,” he says, stooping to grab the lantern.

“Don’t.” Catching him by the wrist, Steve pulls him back. Bucky allows it, although his face is shadowed and his thoughts inscrutable. “You don’t sleep enough.”

When Steve doesn’t let go, Bucky sways forward, following his arm. As he turns, his expression resolves itself into tolerant amusement. “Steve, nobody sleeps enough.”

“ _You_ don’t sleep enough. You look tired.”

He could argue, or simply get up and take first watch anyway. But today he doesn’t, and instead lets Steve pull him a little more until he gets the hint and lies down. The angle of his shoulder aligns with Steve’s chest.

Bucky lies there, their bodies contiguous, unmoving and half unconscious from exhaustion already. Steve pulls back to look at him, all his smooth lines gone frayed from war. There are lines around his eyes that Steve doesn’t recognize, gaunt hollows in his cheek from hunger and tiredness. He’s different. But even still, he’s Bucky.

Their last time was a long time ago, but Steve remembers how Bucky likes it. He kisses him, one hand soft on the side of his throat. Bucky doesn’t move a muscle—he lies there, still as the grave. Only when Steve backs off do his eyes slide open. “You need practice at that,” he says.

But he’s smiling as he says it. “Bucky… shut up for a little while,” Steve says, kissing him again. “Practice that.”

How did they do it back then, before Steve was a hundred-thirty pounds heavier? He didn’t used to crush Bucky when he’d pin him between his thighs, but then his thighs were never so big. Between his legs, Bucky is scorching hot, growing hotter when Steve coaxes his shirt up and off him. He leaves bite marks on his shoulders, deep enough that the imprint of his teeth flashes purple on Bucky’s skin.

“Steve,” Bucky says, holding on like he won’t let go.

Noises travel oddly in the dim closeness of the room. High-pitched whines, little grunts of pleasure, Steve swearing mindlessly under his breath—it sounds a million times louder, like an echo chamber. He smashes his face into the side of Bucky’s neck, rutting gracelessly, thigh against thigh. Memories choke at him; Bucky’s dogtags dig into his clavicle; he pulls Bucky’s hand to his mouth and licks it, forcing a gasp from Bucky’s throat.

He doesn’t pull back and ask if they’re both sure, if things have changed since Brooklyn, if Bucky mightn’t like it if they were twisted up some other position. He doesn’t have words. He loses his words when Bucky unbuttons his pants, taking him in hand. His cock is aching. Every twist of Bucky’s slick palm drives him wild.

He bites down on Bucky’s shoulder to muffle the sounds bursting at every seam. The sound escapes Bucky’s chest instead—a needy gasp as his hips thrust up against Steve’s. Intrigued, he does it again. And again. And again.

“Steve,” he complains. They’ve lost all sense of appropriate volume. His voice is whisper-quiet but Steve grunts every time his fingers tighten on the upstroke. The bed creaks. Steve’s heartbeat sounds as loud as bombs, and Bucky’s choked off noises are so lovely he’d like to hear them louder. There’s no air in the room, no oxygen, and Steve’s dizzy from it.

“Sorry,” he says, and settles for biting into Bucky’s lower lip instead.

Even as he strokes Steve, Bucky can’t help but push up, riding his hips against Steve’s, cluttering up his attempts to get Steve off. It shouldn’t work, but it’s endearing, somehow, and Bucky’s desperation is scorching hot.

It’s too desperate, been too _long_ , for Steve to do anything but come quickly over Bucky’s hand and wrist. Embarrassing noises fall from his lips, although Bucky doesn’t mind; he’s too busy kissing Steve. Actually, he might be laughing.

“Shut up,” Steve says when he can. He takes Bucky’s hand, slick with his release, and pries up the featherbed. He wipes Bucky’s hand on the other side and then shoves it back down again.

This time, Bucky laughs aloud, big and open. He’s beautiful. But his laughs dissolve into gasps when Steve kisses him hot and filthy. He’s not finished with Bucky yet.

On his hands and knees, he crawls down Bucky’s body. He’s long and lean in a strange new way, although Steve’s seen him thin before. Just not this thin. Not in a long time. Biting his way down his stomach, he kisses each translucent scar on Bucky’s hips, ones he’s never seen before. The tissue has gone silvery with time. Steve covers them up with teethmarks.

Bucky’s half-desperate by the time he’s finally freed from his pants. His cock lies hard against his stomach, twitching when Steve breathes over him. His body responds in kind, even though it’s too soon, because Bucky’s unbelievable. Hair in his face, blush spreading across his chest, he squirms under Steve’s hands and says, “Please.”

Steve obliges. He swallows him down, using one hand to jerk him and the other to pin his thigh, fingers digging into the muscle hard enough to bruise. He wants his marks all over Bucky. He wants this to be more than convenience. He wants this night to last.

It’s so goddamn similar, except for how different they’ve become. It’s easier to focus on the similarities—Bucky going boneless as Steve mouths at his balls, the taste of him, impatient fingers curling in the collar of his shirt—but Steve’s not getting dizzy lapping at Bucky’s cock and his wrist’s not getting tired from stroking him. He’s never been able to savor it like this. He’s never been able to _watch_.

Nonsense syllables fall out of Bucky’s mouth, untethered by any common sense. He’s close—Steve can tell from the tense jump of his stomach muscles under his skin. Suddenly Steve wants to give him what he’s never been able to reciprocate, what Bucky taught him when they were seventeen and horny as sin. He waits until he has Bucky’s eyes on him. Then he takes him all in, slowly, so slowly, feeling every inch until his cock is buried in his throat.

Bucky’s boots scrabble against the featherbed, the muscles in his thigh shot through with tension. He says “ _Fuck_ ” and “Jesus” and “Steve, Steve, baby, I’m going to come.”

Steve pulls off, throat afire, grin blazing, and tightens his fist around him. It only takes a few more strokes and Bucky comes, crying out softly as he does.

It’s less messy to swallow. He rests his head in the hollow of Bucky’s hip before pushing up and kissing him. Bucky mumbles some incoherent protest about taste, but he likes it. Steve can tell because his fingers fasten into Steve’s unbuttoned shirt and don’t let go.

His face is wet. Tears slid over his cheeks, into his hairline. Steve kisses him there, on the temple, making Buffy huff. With sharp fingers he yanks at his collar. He drags Steve’s mouth back down to his, kissing him like they never stopped doing this.

Even when Steve pulls free, his left hand holds on, keeping him from going far. Steve’s body, so grotesquely large, barely fit next to him on the bed without them touching, but with Bucky snug against his chest, they fit beautifully. Bucky makes everything alright, Steve muses, as he threads fingers through his hair.

Humming with contentment, Bucky holds the fistful of Steve’s shirt even tighter. Steve smiles, heart full to bursting, and says, “Love you, you jerk.”

It sounds like the truth but it doesn’t count, not really. Not when Bucky’s half-unconscious. And sure enough, Bucky’s eyelashes flutter against his cheek, but he doesn’t move. Doesn’t let go of Steve’s shirt. “Love you too, Stevie.”

“No,” Steve says gently, hands careful in Bucky’s hair, “You really don’t.”

Bucky makes a face at that—his eyebrows knit together briefly, but his eyes don’t open. Steve touches where his frown is, smoothing it all away. Bucky is moments from falling dead asleep. He doesn’t sleep much. Steve wants him, for once, to be somewhere far away from this war.

 _Sleep_ , he says soundlessly, and Bucky does, and minutes later he follows, tumbling down after him.

 

 

Some time later, fingers poke him in the ribs. Clever fingers, that know all his ticklish spots. “Get up, lazybones.”

“Ugh.” Wet drool sticks to his cheek, even as he jerks his head off the featherbed. Bucky’s face swims into view. “What time is it?”

“Rise-and-shine and get-your-ass-out-of-bed time. Frenchie and me found eggs.”

“Eggs?” He blinks. His eyes are bleary from sleep, but the brown blur resolves itself quickly. Eggs. Disbelieving, he touches the fragile shell with his fingernail, afraid he’ll shatter it.

He doesn’t, of course. Bucky, grinning, shows him his haul. One or two are white, and they’re all covered in spatters of dirt. Fresh eggs. Steve hasn’t had a real egg since—well, he doesn’t know. “They’re old,” Bucky says, “But they seem good. They don’t float, at least. I practically had to sit on Gabe to keep him from eating them all. You’re welcome, by the way.”

To sit up, he claws upright on Bucky’s knee. The pockets of his jackets are full, quivering with eggs. “Jesus,” Steve says dazedly, and then, “Did you sleep much?”

“Some. Fried eggs, Stevie.” He shakes the egg in Steve's face. Steve only just woke up and now there are eggs and Bucky’s warm, brightly-lit happiness practically in his lap. Perhaps he’s still dreaming. “Come on, show a little hustle.”

“Hey, Sergeant Barnes!” calls Gabe from downstairs. “Where the hell are my eggs?”

Bucky yells back, “Fuck you, Jones!”

“Who’s cooking?” Steve says. He takes an egg from Bucky’s palm and shakes it too. The yolk slides noiselessly around the shell, but he can feel it gliding around in there.

“Jim.”

“Any good?” He tips the egg back into Bucky’s palm, mindful of its delicacy. To slide it back into the inner pocket of his jacket, Bucky leans in, his knees against Steve’s thigh and the rest of him within Steve’s space.

“Better than his beans, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

“I slept plenty. Get up, Steve,” he says, and he bounces off the mattress, landing on the balls of his feet. He’s very _alive_ this morning. Was it Steve? Is it the fingers Steve bruised into his skin? “It ain’t fitting for an officer to walk around in nothing but his drawers.”

Lucky that Steve’s wearing yesterday’s clothes, then. He slides to the edge of the bed, his bare feet landing on the floor boards next to Bucky’s boots. Some of the featherbed comes with him. “Why aren’t you eating?”

“I had to make sure you were gonna come get some,” Bucky says. He stretches, arms above his head, then dips to loosen the featherbed where it’s tangled around Steve’s hip. His mouth is within reach, and he’s so brightly filled with joy. Steve takes his chance.

“Bucky,” he says, kissing him.

Bucky allows it, but after a moment he steps back. “What are you doing, Steve? Gabe’s gonna be up here after me any minute now.”

“Sorry.” He settles back on the bed, not quite able to make his body cooperate. Bucky’s _right there_. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He does, though. He was thinking that with his arms upright, the arch of Bucky’s rib cage over his hollowed-out stomach reminds him of a vaulted ceiling. Strange and painful, a whole piece of Bucky he doesn’t recognize, but filling him with longing too. He allowed his feelings to get the better of him. But _God_ , he wants him.

Bucky studies him. “You that hard-up for it?”

He recoils, then shoves Bucky away. “Fuck you.”

“Jesus, I thought—” Bucky’s mouth flaps open like a fish. “What, you _don’t_ want to?”

“No,” he lies. “Just—damn it, forget it.” A funny taste like copper pricks up on the back of his tongue, and he stares past Bucky, into the scabby wallpaper, sorting himself out. Ribbons of peeling paper twitch gently, stirred by unseen air currents. In the daylight, it isn’t frightening at all.

Voices float upwards, tolerant, amused voices. “Where the hell is that kid! I’m starving!”

Bucky scoffs, too-loud. He shakes his head and pieces of hair fall in front of his eyes. “Animals.”

His voice is oxygen, and the spark of hurt and anger in Steve’s chest is ready to receive it. “You know they call you _kid_?” he demands.

“Yeah I do,” Bucky says, turning away. He squints at his reflection in his watch face and fixes the sprigs of hair that have come unsettled; to do this, he licks his fingers and then guides his hair back into place. Perfected, he looks unreal, like a photo from a glossy magazine.

“Does it bother you?”

“Not particularly.” He lifts the lantern from where they left it on the floor. Steve’s own reflection catches briefly in the glass. It glares back at him, misshapen and ugly.

“They think you’re younger than me, too,” Steve says, and he doesn’t know what he’s angry about. More accurately, doesn’t know what he’s _not_ angry about. Bucky’s hair, Bucky slapping him away, Bucky carefully fixing himself so Steve’s handiwork isn’t visible. His blood boils in his arteries like hot tar, spreading fast and squeezing out any sense he might have had.

Bucky finally looks at him, eyebrows raised, but not in surprise. Not really. “No shit?”

“They shouldn’t call you that. You’re an NCO. They ought to show you some respect.”

“It doesn’t bother me.” Shrugging, he swings the lantern to-and-fro. The eggs form a bulge in his jacket pockets, distorting the silhouette of his hips. His blue jacket, much too warm for this room and the heat they both left trapped in here, moves according to its own physics. The heavy pockets dangle off his skinny frame, the eggs tapping against each other, _click-click-click._

“Well, it should.”

Even he doesn’t know why he’s still talking about this. Bucky sure as hell doesn’t—his careful non-confrontational self drops away. “Jesus, Steve. Would you leave it alone?”

“What? I’m just asking if it bothers you that they don’t respect you, and that they do it to your face.”

It’s cheap. He knows it’s cheap. When they were young, it was hard for Steve to needle him; he was sunny all the way down, too bright and happy for a kid like Steve. After the war and being a POW and all of it, he wears his vulnerability a little closer to the surface, but Steve found his soft spot years before. All Steve has to do is dig in, anywhere he likes—it’s Steve’s contempt that makes the wound sting.

And Bucky crumples in the face of his contempt, like he damn well knew he would.

“Just—damn it, Steve.” When he reaches up to shove the heels of his palms into his eyes, his stomach just looks concave. Unhealthy. “Would you get dressed. We gotta get out of here. We’re barely going to make it as it is—you’re picking at me.”

“I’m not picking at you,” he lies. The copper taste floods his whole mouth, and this time it’s his own damn fault.

Instead of answering, Bucky whips Steve’s belt at him. The buckle stings where it hits him, right between two ribs. “Get dressed,” he says. He doesn’t shout. “If you’re not downstairs in ten minutes, I’m eating your damn eggs.”

Storming out, he takes all the promise of the morning with him. Steve wishes for a witty retort, even something cutting to say, but it doesn’t come. He’s cold, and the featherbed has gone lumpy, and the smell of damp fluids mixes heavily with the musty scent of down.

He puts his belt on and finds his shoes. Damn Bucky. And damn him, for getting his stupid hopes up, even though he knows better.

“Morning, captain!” The heavenly scent of fresh hard-boiled eggs greets him at the kitchen door fifteen minutes later; there’s also Army biscuits and canned coffee and their usual rations, spread on the bare floor like a strange picnic. As Steve watches, Jim fishes out four finished eggs with a wooden spoon and hands them to Dugan, who distributes them. It’s quite a system.

“Morning, boys.” He has to paper on his smile as he fits in on the floor between Frenchie and Monty. “If you didn’t save me some eggs I’m having you all court-martialed.”

“Gabe tried,” Jim says, plopping new eggs into the water, “But we didn’t let him.”

“I’m hungry!” Everyone bursts out laughing at that, because Gabe is _always_ hungry, always ready to trade a ration of cigarettes for a square of Hershey’s or a French baguette. They’re also laughing because everyone’s hungry in the field, eggs or no.

“Alright, alright. Where’s Bucky?”

Everyone looks at Jim, although Steve doesn’t know why. Jim shrugs and stirs the eggs. “Went outside.”

“Did he eat?” Steve asks.

Jim’s expression turns long-suffering. “No sir.”

“Jesus Christ,” he says, and everyone’s looking at him. He wants to save him some eggs, he knows he could use the protein, but everyone’s hungry. He let him sleep on the featherbed with him. A stab of guilt flashes in his chest. He suppresses it. “Well, we’re not fucking waiting for him. Eat.”

“Finally,” Gabe mumbles, and they all dig in. The eggs shatter as the men bash them against tin cups.

“Shut up, Gabe,” says Jim.

“Casse-toi,” says Frenchie.

“Shut up, both of you,” Dugan says, and they do. He passes Steve a mug with five eggs cooling in it.

Everyone else has two. The last four, still cooking, must be for Jim and for Dugan, because everyone else is tucking in. There’s no eggs for Bucky. But he just said, _we’re not waiting._ There’s always more food for him, because his metabolism works at a ferocious clip. He can’t help it, even if he wants to. Five eggs is so much more than two, though.

Nausea pricks at the back of his throat. But so does hunger. He ducks his head and eats his eggs.

 

 

“How do you want to die?”

Shivers race down his spine, ghosting along his nerves like fingertips. Monty’s idiotic fucking question hovers in the blue night air. Has everyone else stopped breathing? Maybe it’s the wind, but Steve thinks he can hear it echo around their bodies in the grass: _how do you want to die, want to die, want to die._

“What a thing to say, Monty,” Jim says at last, perplexed.

“One o’clock, Buck.”

Somewhere to his left, a low-slung object moves. Bucky exhales; Steve wishes they were closer together. “See him.”

“Quickly, I guess,” Jim continues. There’s no need to bring it back up—it’s a horrible question and they backed away from it on purpose. The sight on Bucky’s rifle is trained on the sentry, a fuzzy shape even to Steve’s enhanced eyes, but it’s difficult to avoid the knowledge of what will happen when Bucky pulls the trigger. It’s a very simple motion. Steve’s done it before. You squeeze, and half a mile away, someone dies quick and bloody.

He wishes Jim hadn’t answered the question.

“Suppose one would want to savor it. Not that I’d like to be in pain,” Monty says. He’s close to Steve, the warmth of his body close enough that Steve can feel it. They are huddled, filthy, clustered on the edge of calm. “But you’d want to feel it, wouldn’t you? It’s the last thing you’ll ever do.”

“Jesus, Monty. I want to die in my sleep, like a normal person.”

Good ol’ Dum-Dum.

“What about you, Gabe?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it.” Privately, Steve thinks that’s most likely a lie. Bucky told him, after the rescue and they were back in London and Bucky was lying on his floor not-sleeping, that they all thought about it when the bombs started flying. His eyes were dead-looking, staring far into the distance, like he was reliving how it felt to think about it.

“ _Rapidement_ , no pain. Falsworth, you want to die so much, you die enough for both of us.”

He can’t take any more of this. He turns to face them, all the men he can see. They look small, like boys in coats, toy guns in hand. “Shut up now. Dum-Dum, you take Jim and Gabe left. Monty and Frenchie, you’re with me, we go right. Bucky, cover. If you see Captain Lienske, don’t shoot him. Got it?”

“Yes sir.” They don’t look nervous, but they’re quiet. What they are about to do is grave. Steve doesn’t like it. It still needs to be done.

“Dernier, those bombs ready to blow?”

“Oui, capitaine.”

“Good. When Bucky takes out the sentry, light them up.”

Someone—Jim, maybe, or Frenchie, it’s impossible to tell them apart in the gloom—turns to him. “How do you want to die, sarge?” It’s Monty’s voice, speaking to Bucky, but the head that turned to look at him hasn’t looked away yet.

These men. Steve isn’t afraid, exactly; he’s wanted this his whole life. Anything but bravery and enthusiasm and, and—anything but the shield on his arm and the gun at his hip would be betrayal. This is what he’s wanted: a body that works and the chance to use it. Adrenaline pounds through his veins and there’s no pain in him, not a single cell. What does it matter what he looks like, or how they got him this way? He can lead these men, and they haven’t died on him yet. Maybe they never will. If Steve wishes, maybe he can make it so. It’s gotten him this far, anyway.

He didn’t apologize to Bucky. He didn’t have the time. He ate Bucky’s eggs, Bucky smoked half a pack of cigarettes, and then they kept moving. Sure, he could have pulled him aside—they’ve been on their feet all day, pushing slowly into Germany—but he didn’t. Excuses cluttered up his brain. Now they’re in the cold, wet moonlight, and the question hangs over them all, just beyond their sight but present, always present.

Bucky sighs as he answers. “Of old age, warm in my own bed.”

A small, private pang of intense relief floods Steve’s chest. That’s what he wants for Bucky. For all of them, but for Bucky most of all.

“What about you, Cap?” It figures it was coming. It’s the wrong question: _how did you_ think _you’d die?_ Of illness, or injury, or starvation when work was slow. Of TB, or a sudden asthma attack, or a violent whirlwind of fists in a darkened sidestreet. Of drowning, or wasting sickness, or maybe just a broken heart.

Tonight, his glorious, medically enhanced heart beats like a jackhammer. He licks salt off his lips and watches the sentry on the wall breathe his last.

“On my feet,” he says.

Bucky makes a sharp sound in his throat that knifes through the darkness. Steve’s heart twitches as if in answer. It’s not an apology, but it’ll have to do.

“On my signal.”

The others tense. The sentry yawns, rubs at his nose. There’s a HYDRA patch on his uniform jacket, illuminated by the cigarette held between his teeth. That’s reason enough for Steve: he lifts his hand, lowers it.

A tremendous noise—gunpowder exploding, bullet racing, ribs cracking, lungs collapsing—rings out across the valley. The pine trees quiver; birds take flight en masse, swirling, circling some massive drain. Ahead, at the house, a soldier raises the shade just quickly enough to see Bucky’s shot paint a red splotch across the sentry’s chest.

Then, the sentry falls, dead already.

They run. The night is unspeakably still except for the cannonade of shots pouring from the HYDRA base. Three defenders, aimed with hand-held machine guns, sprout up from the windows. They’re firing indiscriminately, but Bucky sees them; one takes a hit to the shoulder and disappears.

Dernier’s grenade detonates—too close to Steve. The explosion sounds like a fist against a ribcage, but a million times louder. Yet there’s that same dull _thud_ , both hollow and wet at the same time. The house’s leftmost corner crumbles like a sandcastle before high tide. Inside, the defender who vanished screams horribly as the walls collapse on him.

Two left. Steve makes it to the low garden wall first, followed haphazardly by Monty and Dernier. Before they can even speak, Dernier’s lobbed another grenade. Another deafening explosion, accompanied by an ominous fall of stones. Panicked German yells crowd on top of the other sounds. Another grenade—less yelling.

“Bucky!” He needs to be closer. The Germans are moving in the ruined shell of house, back and forth, hidden by hunks of wall and floorboards. Bucky zigzags through the empty field, a blur of blue against the darkness, but still Steve doesn’t breathe until he’s safely behind cover.

By another section of wall, Dum-Dum is signaling. Move on the house? Steve nods. He prays—for nothing in particular, just fixes on some abstract feel of _home—_ and then hurdles the stone wall.

Someone shoots at him. Luckily, they miss, and Steve makes it across the cratered garden. He kicks the door in. Another someone, further inside the house, ducks behind a wall. He leaves them to Dum-Dum and his team; he and Monty and Dernier move to the right. A shape crashes into Steve, and a blazing sear of pain lights up his arm.

“Fuck!” Two inches of dirty blade stick out of his arm. The soldier wielding it jerks it upwards, _up_ , and it sets every nerve in Steve’s arm aflame. Roaring, he hits him in the face with the shield. The German flies, landing in a crumpled heap by the wall. For good measure, Monty shoots him.

“Sarge!” More machine guns. Close by. It’s Jim’s voice, barely audible over the rat-a-tat of bullets.

“Busy!” comes Dugan’s bellowed response.

They sweep the room they’re in. (Living room? Parlor? It’s destroyed.) Yet another someone shoots from another room down a skinny corridor, forcing Steve to dive to the ground, narrowly missing a bullet that would have scalped him. “I need backup!”

“On your left! Frenchie, your left!” He can’t see either of his guys, can’t see anything but sawdust flying off the wall as bullets thud inches from his head.

“ _Nique ta mére!_ Je ne puis voir—Gabe!” A grenade whizzes past his head. He slackens his jaw just in time, but the blast still knocks him four feet back from the wall.

The timeline is fuzzy, but later, Dernier is there. “Not so fast, capitaine,” he says, helping him up. “Lots more to do.”

He’s right. Steve’s ears are ringing so loud he almost can’t hear the gunshots, but his senses somehow filter the important things to him. Dum-Dum and his team run upstairs, their boots heavy on the splintered treads, and overhead there’s more screaming, more shooting, more abbreviated pleas for help. “Hilfe! Bruno, bitte, helfen Sie—”

They sweep through the first floor. In the kitchen, Monty methodically destroys the cabinets, in case of stragglers, but all it does is make the papers explode. They litter down like snowflakes. A dark blur of a man darts across the doorway, into the back room. Steve pursues, Monty and Dernier right behind.

His shoulder slams into the wall, out of the way of the bullets that pop and fizz down the hallway. One nearly clips Monty in the cheek, leaving behind a crater in the wall by his ear. Tinnitus wails in all their ears, so Steve reads Dernier’s lips _: out of bullets_. His meaning is clear.

Steve leans into the black hole of the doorframe and shoots the German in the chest. His gun drops.

They wait a moment. The soldier gurgles wetly, unthreatening at last, and Dernier goes into the room to search it. It’s a cupboard. A few dusty stacks of papers dot the shelves. None of them look important to Steve’s uninterested eye, but Peggy and Howard can riddle mountains out of molecules. Some sheets have bodily fluids on them, but it can’t be helped.

Dernier comes out, looking tired and sweaty. He shakes his head: not Lienske. That’s for the best, since the man is now dead, but it complicates things. Steve drags a hand over his face and nods at both of them. They retrace their steps to the front of the house.

Guns up, they almost shoot Gabe as he comes down the stairs. “At ease,” he says, joking but also not joking. His voice travels oddly through the ringing in Steve’s head, but he’s had a lot of practice interpreting through malfunctioning ears.

“The others?”

“They’re mopping up the stragglers. Cap…” Gabe nods at his arm. “You’re bleeding.”

Dismissing this with a shake of his head, he looks around. “Bucky?”

“He’s with Dum-Dum.”

That’s where he wants to be, then. “Come on,” he says.

They go slow, not content, not yet relaxed. It’s possible that Lienske could be hidden here, and there’s nothing wrong with searching twice. As they step into the living room, they naturally fan out, scanning the dark shapes among the half-moonlight. Steve checks behind the splintered husk of a piano with a spear of crossbeam sticking out of its heart.

There’s a sound by his ankles, and he flips the shield up. The others have their guns ready. The sound comes again. “Wasser…”

Steve crouches low, looking at the thing caught beneath the collapsed ceiling. The man—it used to be a man. There’s an arm and most of a face and blood, so much blood. He can’t think about what else he’s seeing, what the slimy pink and brown things shimmering in the half-light used to be. He just can’t.

The single eye opens ever so slightly. His lips are chapped. He’s asking for water.

But there isn’t time to get him any. The man dies.

Steve contemplates this in a distant way and shakes dust off his shoes and ankles. Distance is good, distance keeps him from throwing up or breaking down. He knows what being a soldier is. Sometimes it’s watching a man die and there isn’t any time to help him. Sometimes it means shoving things down until daylight can’t reach them.

He turns away, heading back into minotaur’s lair, stepping over hunks of plaster and spent rounds. Some of them are still hot, and they sizzle holes into the carpet. This was a big house. There were four firing machine guns, plus the sentry. Two dead in the living room. Outside, someone is blubbering in German. Hot blood seeps into Steve’s socks.

The night is cooler than the house, although with the roof crumbled and the bare walls cleaved open the difference between the two is minimal. Either way, the night breeze tickles at Steve’s scalp, reminding him of the sweat gathered on his forehead and neck. If he faces away from the house, the landscape is unmarked. There’s no sign of what happened here.

To his right, Dum-Dum and Jim are smoking, voices low, guns trained on two German prisoners. They don’t look much the worse for wear. Jim frowns at the bloody mess of his left sleeve, but he knows from experience that if Steve doesn’t think it’s trouble, it’s not trouble. Even still, his fingers twitch, itching to help.

One of the Germans has small, piggish eyes and a broken jaw, probably courtesy of Dum-Dum’s fist. He can’t be more than eighteen. He glares at Steve with cultivated loathing, which Steve ignores. The other seems completely unaware. His glassy eyes look on nothing at all with a beatific lack of curiosity.

A logistical hassle, to be sure, but Steve’s never sad to see a man surrender. Especially as they’ve failed to find Lienske, or even any sign of him. Maybe these two will know something useful. “Where’s Bucky?” he asks, letting his shoulders droop as relief, at last, washes over him.

Jim nods his head to the left, around the corner of the ruined house. Gabe says something to Frenchie. “Bucky?” Steve says, walking forward in the soft cool moonlight.

He rounds the corner of the house and, at last, finds Lienske. He’s the one with his hands wrapped around Bucky’s throat.

Bucky’s on his back, fingers clawing at the man who’s strangling him to death. His pistol’s out of reach, a good six feet away, as if they had struggled for it before this grotesque, physical confrontation. His beautiful good looks don’t look like much as his face purples, mouth twisted desperately for air. Through it all, though, his hair’s cooperating—that single lovely curl falls over his eyes as they roll back in his head.

Steve has a gun. He has his shield. The Commandos are following behind him. Lienske has only two weak human hands, unsupported by advanced medical science. And Steve is paralyzed, just for a moment, but a moment too long.

“Bucky!”

It’s not him that shoots. It’s not him. It’s not him. It’s probably Gabe, or maybe Monty, who takes the shot. The bullet lances through the German’s throat, leaving behind a red line that gushes a small, discreet amount. It spatters Bucky’s shirt. Lienske’s cooling body slithers sideways off him, into the dirt.

It’s quiet for a moment. The only sound is Bucky’s huge, desperate breaths. Lienske’s foot twitches, but then is still.

Nobody moves. Even Bucky doesn’t, instead lying helplessly for long moments. When he does sit up, the dark splotch of blood travels slowly down his front, getting bigger like a mouth opening up.

Steve stares at him.

Bucky stares back. The bloody drip slows, then stops. Six little dewdrop flowers of red shine on Bucky’s jaw and cheek. He raises a hand and smears them into his skin. His eyes are round as saucers, wide, wide, wide.

“Bucky?” Steve says. His voice isn’t calm. Everything the army pounded into him says to be calm, to be iron, to be a leader. The other, larger part of him that says _Bucky_ is beating that part into submission. One foot closer, then he stops. He’s afraid.

Still shocked, Bucky looks down and sees Lienske’s leg slung over his. His eyes unfocus clear enough for everyone to track it happening, like a newsreel playing in slow motion.

An explosion of movement to his left. It’s Dum-Dum, Jim on his heels, hauling Lienske’s body off him. Bucky’s choking. He’s clawing at his throat where Lienske’s grip has already started to bruise into his skin. Dum-Dum pins his hands to the ground, preventing further injury, but he can’t prevent Bucky from hurting Steve. The noises he’s making, sounds in his throat like his soul ripping up—

Steve would prefer a bullet.

Oh _God_ , he never apologized for this morning.

“Hey, kid, you’re okay, you’re okay. Come on, sit up. Somebody get me some water.”

Unmoored, Steve wobbles on some great precipice. He’s dizzy. Adrenaline screams through his bloodstream and pools in his chest, making his iron horse of a heart gallop hard enough to punch out against his ribs. Can your heart even bruise? He’s panicking, despite the quiet, logical part of his brain that tells him the danger is past. For a moment, he sees the dirt looming up at him, then hands seize him.

 “Bucky…” he says, not knowing who he’s talking to. He’s shivering, but the night’s not cold.

“Easy, Cap.” Gabe is not as strong as him—no one is—but he manages to keep him from toppling. Steve looks at Bucky, then away, both options agonizing. “He’s fine, he’s alright, Jim’s checking him over. Sit down, Captain, you’re looking pretty pale.”

He collapses. A big American house of cards, all engineered muscle and bone, and he falls over on his ass like anybody. The ground is vast, and Steve digs the heels of his hands into it, just to be certain that it’s there. He can’t see Bucky; he’s shielded by Jim, curved over him, checking him out. Gabe is looking after him. Someone, maybe, his frizzy brain thinks, is watching the perimeter, but he’s too scrambled-up to care.

Thumb over knuckles, thumb over knuckles. Hadn’t Bucky done just that, that night in London, while telling him how he’d contemplated, over and over, his own death? Now, in the dirt in the German countryside, Steve repeats that motion: thumb over the knuckles on his left hand.

“Gabe, Frenchie, go check the prisoners. Monty.”

Feet move. Steve isn’t paying attention. Monty touches his shoulder and Steve does his best to inflate his lungs. “Easy, Captain. It’ll be alright.”

No, it won’t. Steve is drowning in the very bottom of an inky black sea, and he sees Monty but only just, as if from very far away. There’s no oxygen in his lungs, no solid surface beneath his feet. Everything’s okay, yet at the same time, everything’s falling apart.

Behind him, Bucky coughs out a wet-sounding sob, as if he’s just remembered how to breathe. Birds settle in the distant pine trees once more. Over and over again, Dum-Dum says, “You’re okay, kid, you’re okay.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Did you capture Captain Lienske?”

“No sir. Collateral damage.” Steve leans against the wall in the rough-hewn outbuilding serving as the communications outpost. The building’s little more than clapboard, nails and a secure telephone line. He drags his forehead across the rough, splintered wall, just to feel the sting.

They met up with a convoy and drove to a new base. The two prisoners. The commandos. The recovered intelligence papers, the ones that looked possibly valuable. They didn’t bring Lienske’s body, but that’s okay; his face is burned into Steve’s brain. Both his grimace as he strangled the life out of Bucky and the surprised look on his pale, deathly face. Steve had plenty of time to memorize his face as he failed to take the shot.

 _Coward,_ his mind reminds him.

Phillips sighs. “Captain Rogers, you are a pain in my ass, do you know that?”

“Yes sir.”

“What did you find?”

“Maps of HYDRA bases. Mostly the ones we’d already hit, in Italy and Czechoslovakia, but there are some plans of the facility near Strasbourg. Weapons diagrams. HYDRA propaganda posters. A couple of soldiers, but too inexperienced to know much or put up much of a fight.”

“So nothing,” he says. No, not nothing—no one’s even interrogated the prisoners, let alone read all the recovered papers, so there could be something worthwhile in there. But it feels like nothing. It feels like a pointless mission; all they got was corpses.

“Practically speaking, yes sir.”

“Any casualties?”

He is not tempted to say _yes_ because there were none. Even Bucky walked away on his own two feet, wearing Frenchie’s quilted jacket over the bloodstain that turned dull as it dried. The Army only counts casualties as injured, killed or missing in action. None of these apply.

“No sir.”

He thinks there ought to be more categories in casualty lists. He doesn’t bring it up, though.

Phillips sighs. “We’ll speak more when you return to Lyon.”

Steve drags his head against the rough wall one last time. Then he hangs up. The aide who’s been assisting him offers him the continued use of the telephone; is there anyone else he’d like to call? He imagines, briefly, calling Peggy, allowing her clipped vowels and warm laugh to take him away from war, from hell.

He decides against it.

A long hallway leads to a busy hub of offices, and people look at him with interest as he passes. In his dress uniform, he cuts a certain profile, but he’s also big and imposing and, apparently, handsome. So why does he feel like crap? Why did he fail to shoot Lienske when he had the chance, and what would all these shiny-faced soldiers say if they knew?

He doesn’t know. He bursts outside onto the sunny square of a French market village. More soldiers. More admirers. He wants to peel his skin off because he thinks that’s a suitable punishment for a coward, for an impostor, a fraud. Across the square, some of the Commandos are lingering outside another building, the one that’s been turned into a commissary of sorts. Dum-Dum raises his arm, bowler hat in hand. “Captain!”

He lifts his hand and bats him away. Not now. He doesn’t know what he wants to do. All he can think is that he should at least be alone, safe in the isolation of his rooms in the town’s half-eviscerated hotel d’ville. He doesn’t even have it in him to nod at the private standing guard at the front door.

The officer’s rooms are on the top floor, clustered around the old office of the mayor. For some reason, he finds himself on the second floor. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for until he finds it.

Bucky’s in the hallway, a blank scrap of paper on his knees. He’s smoking a cigarette. He looks, if possible, more awful than Steve feels, although that could be the purple bruise ringing the column of his throat. He doesn’t lift his head off the wall as Steve marches down the long hallway. “Steve.”

“Bucky—”

Bucky doesn’t do or say anything; he lets the cigarette burn between his fingers. Ash gets on his pants, leaving sooty stains behind.

“Bucky,” Steve says again, helpless.

At last, the waters are disturbed: Bucky ducks his head into his knees. He crushes the paper, crumpling it up like it’s nothing. “Steve… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t—” He crouches in front of him, seizing him by the ankle, as if to reestablish that he’s real.

“No, I’m really sorry, Steve.” Bucky lifts the corner of his face, one eye looking up at Steve, the rest of him still curled into knees. Painfully twisted, supplicant. Steve’s chest locks up. “I shouldn’t have let him sneak up on me—”

“What?” He wasn’t expecting that. “Shut up.”

“Steve. Please. I want—” When he faces Steve, all of him, not hiding, Steve sees something in him that he hasn’t, not for a long while; Bucky wants him. He wants him. Here, on the dirty floor of a French town hall.

“Bucky,” he says. It’s been days; before this, it was years. The last time Bucky looked like this it was 1943. All that long time, Steve’s never stopped. Does Bucky…?

“Please, Steve,” he begs. “I want—I want to forget a while.”

Steve freezes, the words washing over him like a tidal wave. Of course he doesn’t. Of course he just wants the warm heat of Steve’s body as a distraction. For a moment, though, he thought Bucky knew the truth. “Oh. Okay,” he forces himself to say. “Alright, come on.”

Bucky’s palm sweats against his, but that’s okay; Steve wishes he could always hold Bucky’s hand. They steal down the corridor together and stumble up the stairs, and Steve never lets go of him. He’s afraid he might be hurting him, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind.

He gets the door of his quarters open and Bucky almost jumps him then and there.

 _“Fuck,”_ he says, head smashing against the wall. It smarts like a bitch, but Bucky swallows the hurt noise he makes.

“Bed,” he says, before biting Steve’s lip like he’s trying to hurt him. Good. Steve would love for him to hurt him, he would, so he complies, dragging them both onto the bed. He wants Bucky to eat him raw.

Pants, gone. Belts, gone. He yanks his shirt off and nearly rips the buttons off Bucky’s shirt before Bucky stops him. Not that Bucky’s doing any better; he kicks his shoe so hard it launches at the door, hitting with a concussive thud that makes them both flinch.

“My fault,” Steve says, taking his face in his hands and kissing him. It wasn’t, but it doesn’t matter. He keeps peeling clothes off Bucky’s skinny body, freeing up acres of skin and putting his mouth on top of them. He can make Bucky forget. He can be useful, at least.

But even his best-laid plans have never fully accounted for Bucky Barnes. Bucky slips from his grasp and slides to the floor between his feet, face upturned, gaze scorching. Kneeling, he runs his fingers backwards up Steve’s legs, knees to hip, and he’s trying to go slow. He must be. His hands tremble against Steve’s bare leg. Steve feels like he’s going to die, it’s been thirty seconds and his cock is so hard he could die.

“Holy shit,” he says. He doesn’t recognize his voice.

“Remember when I taught you this?” Bucky says. He licks at his already red, already wet lips. Steve grips his shoulder so hard it has to hurt, it _has_ to.

“Christ, ‘course I do.”

Bucky keeps his molten eyes on Steve’s as he leans in and licks at Steve’s cock. It jumps, smearing wet onto Bucky’s face. “And you said I never taught you anything.”

Reverently, Steve traces his fingers through the slick pre-come on the corner of Bucky’s jaw and rubs it into his skin. His cheek, his chin, his mouth. Impatient little fucker that he is, Bucky pushes him away and takes his cock in his mouth.

He sucks slow and lazy, eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks as he watches Steve’s face. Like he knows exactly what he’s doing. He always did, good Christ, know just how Steve liked it. When he takes Steve all the way in, his eyelashes flutter, thick with tears, but he swallows without trouble. It makes Steve’s stomach turn over. And he does it again. This time, Steve holds on and prays.

The head of his cock slips from Bucky’s lips. “Remember,” he says, throat hoarse. He doesn’t finish his thought—but _God,_ yes, Steve remembers it all. He remembers each and every time they got to do this. Every stolen kiss, every pity-fuck, every time he sweet-talked Bucky into getting on his knees.

Meanwhile, in this sweltering hot moment, Bucky’s eyes slip closed. His hair is plastered to his face and his left hand is between his legs, jerking himself off. Steve’s stomach actually hurts as he realizes this. Fingers tight in Bucky’s hair, he tugs, forcing Bucky to look up at him.

They don’t speak. Bucky looks at him, one hand around his cock and his other splayed over Steve’s thigh. His eyes are all black pupil, with the thinnest ring of grey-blue. He isn’t even sucking Steve off anymore; instead, he’s kneeling between Steve’s legs, quiet and almost still. Not for a second does he look away.

“Come for me,” Steve says. There’s a moment when Bucky wobbles, as if about to collapse, but he doesn’t. Instead, he presses into the hand Steve has buried in his hair. He strips his cock urgently, no teasing, no preamble. Almost business-like, but only Steve can see how much he’s shaking.

He comes over his hand and stomach. And he looks up at Steve afterwards, worn out and sad-eyed but smiling. And goddamnit, Steve has to kiss him.

His chest hurts, but he doesn’t think about it. He thinks only about how Bucky falls onto his back, legs spread. Like he used to. He ignores the bruises on Bucky’s body, leaves new ones. He gets his dick between Bucky’s thighs, slapping at his hip, saying urgently, “Tighter, baby, come on.” And Bucky does so, whimpering in his throat. Steve bites on his shoulder and rolls his hips against him. It’s inhuman how hot Bucky’s skin is, how close he is.

“God,” he says savagely. “Goddamnit, Bucky, you’re—” Panting in his ear, Bucky touches him everywhere.

“Steve, Steve, baby,” he says. He pushes his hips and his soft cock against Steve and kisses across his chest. “Come on me, like before, please, Stevie.”

When he gets close, he bites down on Bucky’s shoulder, hard enough that Bucky makes a shaky-hurt-ecstatic noise, one that travels straight to Steve’s cock. His brain whites out before he comes all over Bucky’s thighs.

They lay there for a minute or two. Then Steve rolls off. Bucky shivers like a plucked guitar string, then lies still.

Moments pass. Outside Steve’s door, footsteps pound the stone floor and then recede. No one interrupts. They lie there, not touching. Steve feels like a metal spike with lightning through it, leaping back and forth between their bodies, even across the space between them. The silence is deafening. It’s getting into his skin. He needs someone to say something. Anything.

After a long minute, Bucky turns himself over, into Steve’s space. They still don’t touch, but it’s like a beacon in the darkness to Steve. He reaches forth and pets Bucky’s head, pushing damp hair off his sweaty face.

Bucky turns into his hand, eyes closed, like a flower seeking sunlight. It makes Steve feel so goddamn good. It’s a simple chemical reaction: Bucky’s needs and Steve’s proximity. But it feels real. It quiets the screaming silence in his ears.

“Missed you,” he says.

Bucky pushes closer. He hasn’t opened his eyes. “Me too, Steve.”

With his eyes shut and his mouth unlined, Bucky looks half-asleep already, arms curled around him the way a child sleeps. The way he had when they were both very small.

“Why’d we stop doing this?” he asks.

“Been wondering that myself.”

His eyes open, unnaturally bright in the low-light of the torch lamp. “Really, Steve. Why did we stop?”

Steve sits up and reaches for his balled-up shirt. “Because you shipped out.” And they never restarted, even though Steve wanted to. Desperately.

He offers the shirt to Bucky.

Instead of pushing at what Steve’s said, Bucky nods. The shirt can only do so much, but he’s a little less messy when it’s done. Steve helps, carefully dabbing at his thighs, taking care of Bucky the way Bucky had always taken care of him. It’s natural to extend that into reaching for him. It only takes a little work to arrange him as he likes, the block of his shoulder held fast under Steve’s arm, but it’s good work. It’s encouraging to be able to move him. It’s thrilling that he allows himself to be moved.

Bucky makes a soft noise in his throat, head pillowed on Steve’s chest. And Steve feels rhapsodic, which is insane. But he can taste sunshine on the back of his teeth and heat in his belly, joy gone incandescent. It’s a wonder it’s not shining out of his pores. It’s a wonder that he can still feel this way, after all the mud and the hunger and the nightmare body and Lienske’s blood all over Bucky’s shirt. It is a miracle, here in the middle of hell. Bucky, sticky and sweaty and all in his space, is better than a featherbed. Bucky’s better than anything else in the world. To him, Bucky’s home.

“I love you, Steve,” he says, fingers soft against Steve’s heart.

This time he doesn’t argue. This time, he lets himself believe it, if only for a moment or two. “Love you too, Buck.”

 

 

Bucky’s not in his bed when he wakes up. He isn’t angry. Bucky can’t sleep in his room in officer’s quarters, because Jim will notice him missing. Jim will notice and tell Dum-Dum, and Dum-Dum will be required to report it to Steve. And Steve will either have to confess that he’s got Bucky in his bed, naked as sin, or pretend that he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to chew Bucky out for an unjust curfew violation and he _really_ doesn’t want Bucky to be discharged from the army as a homosexual and deviant, so he’s not angry when he wakes up and Bucky isn’t in his bed.

He sits up. The covers roll off his hips and expose his bare thighs. He puts his hands on his knees while he surveys his sparse room, devoid of things that make it a home. The other side of the bed is not warm, but it is sticky, slightly. He isn’t angry.

He dresses. He puts on his PT gear and goes downstairs. The Howling Commandos are waiting for him in the muggy, roiling wet pre-dawn of southern France. The temperature has dropped another degree or two, and they shiver. Bucky doesn’t, but Steve chooses not to see.

“Morning,” he says. They grunt at him. No one’s happy. Gabe’s eyes are so red he seems to be wearing goggles. Dum-Dum, who always looks unnaturally listless and lumpy, like unkneaded dough, in his PT uniform, spits onto the cobblestones. “Get any rest?”

Monty nods. He’s the only one.

The silence, he realizes, is because no one’s complaining. Uneasily, he stands there, in the market square in the French town they’re recuperating in, facing his troops. They look back at him through weary, dejected eyes. It’s still twenty or so minutes before daylight and Steve, being their commanding officer, has made them come out here to run.

“We’ll take it easy today,” he says. Normally, that makes them laugh. Normally, though, they aren’t coming off a botched mission where the target ended up dead, their non-com ended up almost dead and Steve had a nervous breakdown watching it. They probably hate him. “We’ll head from here to the mile marker outside of town and back.”

They stare at him. They’re rubbing at their arms in the cold. It’s about a three-mile run, something easy for them. Steve, feeling like a fraud, leads them through some preliminary stretches.

The rules don’t bend just because the last mission went to hell in a handbasket. And Steve’s in trouble enough for killing Lienske. Tomorrow, Phillips’ XO, Savoie, an irritable toady of a man who says everything in memos instead of speech, is coming up from Lyon just to berate him. It’s his job to make sure they’re in fine physical condition, even if his brain is unspooling at the edges.

When they finish stretching, Steve says “Go,” and they start running.

He can run faster than any of them. That part isn’t news. But Steve stretches his legs and suddenly he’s taking off. He runs through the stone-walled town, past the bedded-down inns and hostels reposing in silence, past the French houses with their peasant occupants rising early. Other companies, other squads, are up and at it, too. Steve sees more of them than his own men, overtaking them at a speed so fast his feet barely touch the ground.

Why? It feels good to run. It feels good to yank oxygen into his enormous lungs. It feels good to be moving, even through the slimy air. The Commandos are far behind. He doesn’t think about them. He focuses on the air in his lungs.

His brain is all over the place, but running focuses it. He didn’t understand, before, when people said that exercise could sharpen the mind. Now, his body is a crucible, and running forces all the bad, maladaptive, jumbled thoughts to distill into focusing on the breath in his chest and the blood pounding under his skin.

He reaches the mile marker first. He slaps it. He runs back to town and passes the Commandos before they even reach the edge of town. Is he going twice as fast as they are at a dead-sprint, or faster?

He doesn’t know how fast he can physically go. All he knows is that when he pushes himself, past what he ought to be capable of, his mind is clear.

The sun has yet to rise when he gets back to town, although a rosy glow touches the unshattered glass windows in the hotel d’ville. It’ll be morning soon. Steve will have to go and force his knees to fit under desks and make his shoulders stop taking up so much room. He’ll have to go and be an officer and be away. And it won’t change anything.

Instead of slowing to a stop in front of the hotel, he keeps going. His speed barely dips as he slides in the dirt. Even his agility is unnatural. He turns around and heads back out, the air whipping at him as he runs as fast as he can. Again, he overtakes the Commandos, leaving them huffing and puffing in his wake.

The town rouses itself from sleep as he pushes himself further, harder. Covers are pulled back, lamps are lit. It’s dark, but inside each lighted window, villagers are sitting up and blinking. The married couples wake up next to each other and kiss. They have _no idea_ how lucky they are.

Steve runs. He passes individuals, skipping around them as if they’re nothing, realizing later that they’re his men. Technically, they ought to be in unit formation, but technically, Steve’s supposed to match their pace. Not today.

He stretches his legs and wet air fills his lungs to bursting. He touches the mile marker again and again and just keeps running til he doesn’t think anymore.

He runs.

He runs.

He runs.

When he makes it back the third time, he stops. For a second, he thinks he’ll keep going, but then he doesn’t. His muscles are singing, aching sweetly, but he could do it all again. He could do it a hundred times more.

He doesn’t. He drinks a little water and stamps his feet and waits for the others to return.

Bucky makes it back first; Monty’s at his heels, bedraggled as hell, red-faced.

“Stop,” Steve says, seeing the way Monty’s moving. “That’s enough. Twice is fine.” The others are staggering in behind them, solo and then together, clumps and clots of exhausted men. They move with a shattered kind of care, as if unbearably conscious of every joint and muscle. Sweat shimmers on their faces, despite the clammy temperature, but they are all running as they reach the courtyard, just as they should be.

Frenchie and Dugan pause to throw up, but they’re an exception to the rule.

He didn’t know that was going to happen. Six miles is more than three. But it’s not impossible for a fit group of men, even if they are expected to keep the pace he sets. He wasn’t expecting them to, though, so maybe they shouldn’t have tried.

“At ease,” he says, feeling idiotic. Dernier wipes vomit off his mouth and stares at him in something between confusion and contempt. “Six is fine. We’re done with running for the day.” And he’s standing there, lightly perspiring, muscles warm but not painful. The other men are wrung-out and sliced to ribbons, bodies as limp and pained as if Steve had taken to them with a cheese grater.

Most of them, anyway. Not Bucky. Not Bucky, whose mouth is a vicious, unhappy slash. Not Bucky, who throws his canteen at the ground in frustration. Hard—it bounces with a hollow _ping,_ skittering off the grass and landing in a heap in the dirt. Steve, surprised, looks at it, then Bucky, then it again. The other commandos look prudently away.

He licks at his lips and bends down to rub at his shins. They sting, but only barely. Behind him, Bucky, a malevolent cloud of pissed-off silence, waits.

“You took your sweet time,” he says as he crouches low, staring into the dirt. If Bucky’s fixing to be pissed, he’ll give him something to be pissed about.

“You ran nine miles. Did you think they were gonna keep up?”

Steve keeps his head angled away, trying not to notice the edge in Bucky’s voice, the knife-like tension in his shoulders. “You’re not even sweating,” he says, like that changes anything.

Bucky’s eyes flash, going wide and then narrowing as he rises into a fine, inexplicable rage. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

He rises. “It means you’re not sweating, Bucky.”

He doesn’t know what’s set Bucky off, except that Bucky isn’t sleeping and neither is Steve and neither is anyone else in this unit, because two days ago someone died on top of Bucky and Steve watched it happen. They’re not sleeping because there’s never enough to eat because Steve eats so much. They’re not sleeping because they’re all inches and one bad hand of cards away from death.

Dum-Dum’s voice, directly behind him, sounds far away, unimportant. “Sir, they’re pretty worn out already. You still thinking of doing grass drills?”

“Well, what do you think?” he says, eyes fixed on Bucky’s face. The distance between them is microscopic. He thinks he’d like Bucky to take a swing at him.

Only, Bucky doesn’t do that, because Bucky is smart. Although Bucky’s face and body language are begging for a fight, his voice is controlled. “I think Sgt. Dugan and I can handle grass drills, sir.”

He wants to scream, _don’t call me sir. Call me by my fucking name_. They pinned his captain’s bars on him without his input or consent, another way of making him different, making him other. At least the machine was his choice. At least Erskine asked him if he wanted to be a two hundred and thirty pound muscular freak who can rip limbs off grown men and punch holes in cement walls. He didn’t need to be so strong! He didn’t! He would have settled for being like Bucky. He would have been so grateful to be just how Bucky is. Undisfigured. Uncorrupted. Normal.

He doesn’t say any of this. He turns and spits onto the churned-up earth.

“Fine, Bucky.” He has never pulled rank on Bucky, and he never will. “You two run the drills. I’ll supervise.”

He _is_ angry that Bucky wasn’t in his bed this morning. Even though it’s not his fault. He’s angry about the finger bruises on his throat, too. Also not his fault. As far as he can tell, the only thing that is Bucky’s fault is that he picked Steve up one day when they were both young and didn’t know better. He taught Steve how to suck cock and he volunteered to join the Commandos even when his discharge papers were halfway processed. He’s handsome without trying to be. He could get girls, if he wanted, but he never really wanted them all that much. He stuck by Steve’s side their whole lives, so Steve could never get away and never wanted to.

Bucky stands on the grass in his white t-shirt and belted shorts and leads them in grass drills. Steve stands thirty or forty feet off, like a spare, rusted part, lying uselessly in the wet grass. The sun slips over the hills while they’re throwing themselves in the dirt and picking themselves back up, simulating combat. Bucky calls out orders but doesn’t throw himself in the dirt. Maybe he can’t do it. Maybe he still feels Lienske’s fingers on his throat.

Steve can feel Lienske’s fingers, and he never even touched him.

Dugan goes easy on them, though. It’s Bucky calling out the exercises but it’s Dugan who calls it quits after only ten minutes. And it’s not a moment too soon, it looks like: Gabe collapses face-first in the mud and a few of the others seem likely to join him. Feeling ill, Steve walks away. He has meetings, anyway.

And they’re important meetings. He gets timetables. He gets Savoie’s schedule for tomorrow. The French quartermaster discusses what food and gear they’ll need for upcoming missions. Mostly, he bends his knees under desks until they fit. Mostly, he listens while other people talk to him, about places he hasn’t been and might not live to see. It’s fine. He smiles at all the right moments and tries to keep his thoughts in line.

Of course they’re drinking when Steve finally gets out of his last meeting. He stumbles into the mess hall and they’re drinking beers at the bar and laughing. Realistically, he should be across town at the officer’s club, but no one seems to mind when he stations himself at the side of their group. Alcohol has made them flushed and receptive and wiped away any grudges that they may have.

“Capitaine,” Dernier says magnanimously, saluting Steve with a cigar. Monty, intervening before he can set his hair on fire, plucks the cigar from his hand. Dernier doesn’t notice. “You are always in so many meetings, capitaine.”

“More meetings tomorrow. You boys keep yourselves out of trouble today?

Dernier laughs a sly laugh which could mean anything. He presses closer to the bar to order Steve a drink, and the space that he frees up has Bucky in it.

“Hey,” Steve says, heart thudding eagerly against the forefront of his ribs.

Bucky puts his glass down slowly and turns it over in his hand, three times. His gaze passes over Steve like so much empty space and Steve’s heart tumbles down into his gut.

“Ignore him,” Jim says, and he ruffles his hand through Bucky’s hair until it sticks up in the back. And Bucky ducks his head like a friendly dog, white teeth grinning even though the skin around his eyes is still pulled tight. “He’s just pissed off at you because you made him run so far.”

Bucky doesn’t deny it; he only smiles, all at Jim and the others, nothing left for Steve. It might make him jealous, except Steve’s got his fingerprints stamped into his cells. And he’s realized, maybe, part of why he’d run so long and hard was because he didn’t want to feel Bucky all over him anymore. He didn’t want to feel anything.

He feels Bucky’s fury, though. Like a brick wall to the face.

“Sorry I worked you all over so hard this morning,” Steve says to the Commandos instead.

“Capitaine, you are a bastard,” Dernier says, and everyone laughs. Steve manages a weak smile as Dernier hands him a cold beer. He drinks a huge gulp of it, but they keep talking.

“Hot damn you can run fast,” Gabe says.

“Must have been what, thirty, forty miles an hour?”

“No, that’s ridiculous, a human being couldn’t possibly—”

“Possibly? You saw it with your own eyes didn’t you? A human being _did.”_

“I don’t think it was actually that fast,” Steve starts to say, but the conversation avalanches past him, rolling on.

“But you weren’t even breathing all that fast! You hardly broke a sweat!”

“Now how do you know if he was sweating?”

“How fast can you go, Captain?”

“I don’t know,” he says. His heartrate is spiking. The commandos jostle closer, smothering him.

“Tell me, Captain,” Monty says, and his voice is so close Steve feels humidity against his skin, “What did it feel like? The experiments they did on you. Was it just like a science fiction film, where they stretch you like an elastic band?”

“Well,” Steve says, struggling to keep his voice level, “It kind of felt like having every bone in my body broken with an iron horseshoe. Even my fingers and ankles and the little bones in my ear. Like they cracked me open and shoved pins into my nerves and rebar into my eyeballs. And then, right when it _really_ started to hurt, they set me on fire.”

No one says anything in response. Monty looks astonished, mouth open, eyes goggling and no retort ready. Even Bucky and Dum-Dum look alarmed. In the absolute reverent silence, Steve swears he can hear his heartbeat shake the floorboards.

He drains his beer. “Fellas.”

The empty glass he leaves on the table. The commandos he leaves behind, slack-jawed and gaping in his wake.

It takes him over an hour to get back to his room. Not for any reason other than a virulent fury at his friends, the kind that makes it impossible for him to lie down and go to sleep, even though he wants to. If he stays awake long enough, he begins to feel like a record needle in a long, jagged furrow, producing the same discordant note over and over again. The static is too piercing to let him forget and fall asleep.

He circles the town a couple of times until he knows the stone walls and little shops like the back of his hand. Night has fallen, cold and damp, over the Rhône-Alpes, and the stars shine in the sky like blazes of fire in a vast emptiness. It’s incomprehensible that it’s the same sky as in Brooklyn, as in London, as in the silent field where he almost let Bucky die.

He tells himself again, for the millionth, maudlin time, that he should have taken the shot.

The mess hall is quiet on his way back to his rooms, the hubbub having died down to chatter. There’s a piano playing. He ignores it. If he were to see any of the Commandos, he’d ignore them too, but he doesn’t. He makes it all the way back to his rooms before he sees another commando. The one he does see is waiting for him, patiently blocking his bedroom door.

 _“Bucky?”_ Steve says, amazed. After being an unbearable shit all day, the last thing he was expecting was Bucky.

Bucky looks at him without moving, all funny and tired and completely inscrutable.

He’s so goddamned handsome where he stands, lean and tanned against Steve’s bedroom door. Two roses bloom in his cheeks, from alcohol or exhaustion, set beneath that stupid, geometrically perfect curl across his brow. He’s unbuttoned his collar, showing off the fingerprints on his throat. Earlier, that might have made him angry, made him think Bucky was trying to throw it in his face. Now it just makes him tired.

“You scared them, at the bar.”

“Thought you were pissed at me.”

“I _am_ pissed at you,” Bucky says waspishly, “But you scared them.”

Slumping, he knocks his head against the wall. His brain throbs feebly in his skull. “I’ll talk to them tomorrow.”

“You scared them,” Bucky says. “You didn’t upset them, didn’t piss ‘em off or sneeze in their soup. They’re scared because they worry about you.”

“Well,” Steve says, but he doesn’t know how to follow it up. Worried about him? Worried because they saw him crack. They think he’s cracking up. The next time they go into battle, will they trust Steve to have their backs? Sighing, he swallows against the ball of acid in his throat and says, “I’ll deal with it tomorrow. Go on back to bed.”

Narrowing his eyes, Bucky plants his feet, spine straight. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“No. Let me in.”

At a loss, Steve searches for a good, unselfish reason not to let him in. Something better than, _I don’t remember how I used to hide the truth from you, and it’s tearing me up_. “Bucky—you’ll get busted.”

“No I won’t. I’ll sneak out like I did this morning. Jim’ll cover for me.”

If Jim knew what he was covering for, he’d have an aneurysm. Jim probably thinks he’s helping Bucky court a doe-eyed French milkmaid, not a bitter, inferior medical mistake. _Science fiction,_ Monty called him.

“I’m not going to let you get in trouble.”

“It’s not—I don’t want to sleep alone.” Bucky looks at him, all eyelashes. Steve softens. “I don’t want to think about it.”

And he crumples. Not so much that anyone else would notice, anyone who hadn’t grown up with him and seen him fall apart so quietly before. He got so good at shattering without anyone noticing, that Steve used to pick him to pieces without realizing that he’d already been ground down.

But that was then. Now he surrenders his flimsy excuses and his half-assed reasons why not. Now he’s smart enough to take Bucky’s hand and pull him into the bedroom, shutting the door on the world outside.

Mutely, they struggle out of their clothes. Bucky keeps his undershirt and boxers on and smashes his face into the pillow before Steve can even untie his shoelaces. As Steve finishes undressing, he lies there, a solitary anchovy, shoved up flat against the wall like he’s afraid to take up space.

He turns his head when Steve crawls in after him. Finely wrought capillaries dot the edges of his eyes, but not so many. As usual, Bucky doesn’t look exhausted; it’s in his carriage, in the plunge of his expression as soon as he lets his guard down. He’s always been able to turn his smile on and off.

Steve rearranges them so that Bucky’s not crowded into the margin. His own body still takes up too much space, but oh well. Sighing, Bucky melts like candle wax, filling Steve with a quiet, not unpleasant surprise. This isn’t sex—Steve figured it was, but it isn’t. Bucky came here to absorb his heat and hear him breathe and just be close to him. This isn’t sex. It’s nothing like the truth that Steve is burdened with, but it’s something, all the same.

“I’m sorry,” he says into Bucky’s shoulderblades.

Bucky sighs. “It’s fine. Forget about it.”

And he lies there, radiating a silent dissatisfaction so profound it’s like waves of heat. Rigid from head to toe, he’s clearly in pain. Guiltily, Steve touches at the back of his neck, the place where the ribbon of purple bruising disappears into unmarked skin. “Talk to me?”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.” _Anything._ “I shouldn’t have made you mad this morning. Talking about you sweating. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Bucky’s ribcage flares as he sighs. “It’s fine, Steve.”

“Because if I made you angry—”

 _“God,_ Steve. You’re still as goddamn stubborn as you always were, you know that?” Bucky keeps touching Steve’s hand where it’s holding him close, drawing curlicues around each knuckle. “You’re still you.”

“I’m still me,” Steve confirms.

“And I’m still me?”

He puts his cheek on Bucky’s shoulder, where he can feel the delicate rhythm of his heartbeat under his skin. “Of course you are.”

“Even if I don’t sweat?”

Steve has no idea what he means, but he’s so tired. “You’re you and I’m me,” Steve says, kissing his shoulder.

“You always will be. No matter what they do to you,” Bucky says, and a sudden tremor jolts his voice. “People don’t change. People don’t change inside.”

He doesn’t know what to say in response. Maybe not on the inside. But on the outside, yes. They made him different. People tell him that he’s handsome, but he’s not stupid; he’s seen himself. It was a price to pay to fight for his country and to do what was right, and he paid it. But Bucky doesn’t see that. Blind or naïve or hopeful or something altogether, Bucky’s only ever seen the best in him.

He forces his arms to relax where they’re caught tightly around Bucky’s chest. “Not me, Buck. Solid as a rock.” It must be what Bucky wants to hear; he exhales, squeezing Steve’s hand.

He drifts off at some point. He isn’t sure when, but he knows it’s to the reassuring sound of Bucky’s chest, rising and falling, rising and falling, steady as the tides.

 

 

So: Steve is drowning.

He’s back in the inky black sea he’d been at the bottom of, and this time he’s very much alone. The Commandos aren’t with him, Bucky’s not with him. The only person in the bottom of the ocean with him is Lienske, who’s both a man and a maelstrom, a seething foaming mass of violence. He sees the dead body of the man crushed under the house, the Germans he killed the week before, the vacant-eyed hopeless soldiers he’d killed the week before that. And then Lienske’s mouth opens up into a screaming, whirling red-black maw, and he swallows Steve whole.

He gasps, and it’s Bucky’s voice in his ears, not Lienske. He never heard Lienske speak: the only sound Lienske made was a bloody cough as he slid into the dirt.

“Steve! Steve, wake up!”

He knows at once that he’s dreaming, even while the dream dissolves around him. It can’t have been long that he was sleeping. He cringes, thinking of the other exhausted sleepers in this hallway, waking up to the sound of him whimpering in his sleep. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t, you’re fine.” Bucky’s hands are on his arms, almost chafing at his skin. Blinking, he sees light. Not real light. Just Bucky’s camp lantern, illuminating them both with ghostly shadows. He isn’t scared, though, not when Bucky’s near. “You were having nightmares. You were calling out in your sleep.”

Automatically, he says, “I’m fine, I’m okay.”

Bucky doesn’t let go of him. His hands slow. Only half of his face is really visible in the dull light thrown off by the lantern; Steve pushes up, searching for the other half of him. Yes, there’s Bucky, in all his glory, his throat that livid purple-green-yellow bruise and his expression worried.

Steve settles back down. They don’t fit. His knees curl into Bucky’s side and his head lands somewhere around his stomach, chin digging into the ribs he’d longed to worship back in the farmhouse. He sticks his face into Bucky’s warm stomach and breathes.

Almost nervously, Bucky touches the back of his head. “Steve… you don’t sleep much.”

No, he doesn’t. He slept better in that house, on that featherbed, than he has in months, but no, he doesn’t. Nobody does.

He says nothing.

“What do you dream about?” Bucky asks. His voice is smaller than the room, smaller than their heartbeats, even. His hair is in his face and it shadows his eyes.

“I don’t know. Last couple nights, Lienske.” A shiver rolls down his spine, but he suppresses it. “I shoulda taken the shot. I know I should have.”

It’s Bucky’s turn to court silence. When he speaks, it’s with a shrug. “You had orders to bring him in. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Steve doesn’t have the time to tell him how incorrect he is. He doesn’t have the words. This isn’t how they used to talk, before the war. Before, things had been so black and white. Sure, he’d hidden the truth from Bucky because it was ugly and unrequited, but they didn’t lie. Either Bucky’s lying when he says it’s okay, or he isn’t. He isn’t sure which one’s worse.

Slowly, he convinces himself to breathe. He flexes his fingers against Bucky’s back, where his shoulderblade hides his heart and all its precious connective tissues. His voice catches when he asks, “What do you dream about, Bucky?”

“Zola. He wore these glasses…” He shudders, something bone-deep and ugly, from the bottom of his spine to the helpless spasm of the fingers of his hand against Steve’s chest. “Sometimes I still see them, when the light catches, and I think he’s here…”

“Jesus, Bucky—”

Bucky kisses him, until his spine unstiffens and his fingers uncurl where they’re digging in like spikes to anchor him. “I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s just stupid, right?”

He wants to say he’ll kill Zola, he’ll rip him limb from limb, he’ll obliterate him into atoms, but his mouth is frozen. He couldn’t take the shot.

“It isn’t stupid,” he says instead. It’s all he can manage. The truth is just too big to get out of his throat. It sticks there. It feels like he’s swallowed his heart, thick and shuddering, trapping all his words inside. Bucky turns his head to watch him, so that the curve of his cheek is drenched in light. His hair shimmers, his eyelashes, the stubble on his jaw.

The only thing that gets past the blockade in his throat is this: “I shoulda saved those eggs for you. I really wish I had.”

For a moment, Bucky doesn’t say anything. His fist sits in the indent of Steve’s chest, right above his heart. At last he says, “Steve, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

He nearly laughs. But it doesn’t matter, not really; Bucky tangles their ankles together, his hand warm on the back of Steve’s neck, touching him in so many places it’s not clear where either of them stops or starts. He likes the idea of that. He’d like Bucky to bleed into him, maybe make him better than he is.

They lie there in the quiet. Far away, planes drone and buzz. Steve tucks his cheek against Bucky’s shoulder, inches away from the bruise Lienske left there. He doesn’t think about it. Doesn’t think about it.

He lies there for hours, not thinking about it. Bucky lies there with them, and neither of them sleep.

 

 

There’s a knocking at the door, smart and rapt.

“Come in.”

When Steve lifts his head, his eyes swim for a moment; the dizzying symbols and inexplicable place names, all written in spiky penmanship, have blinded him. He’s been squinting at the map for over an hour now, and all he’s gotten is a headache. Dum-Dum, hat under his arm, stands in the doorway and watches him sweep papers into an empty drawer.

“What’s the word from Phillips, Cap?”

Waving him in, Steve rubs his hands through his hair. “Not good. Turns out Captain Lienske may have been an attaché in Berlin. They think he could have had valuable insight into Nazi high command.”

Very valuable, the terse memo sitting in Steve’s desk drawer says. Dum-Dum frowns. His mustache twitches as he sucks on his teeth, contemplating. “How’re they taking the news that we shot him?”

Steve smiles bleakly. “Well, Dum-Dum. They took it well.”

Dum-Dum chews that over, saying nothing. Steve, unable to bear his silence, walks over to the window. The daylight is shorter, scrappier on this side of September; the summer they’d been cherishing so recently has fled. Wet leaves disintegrate into pulp on the sidewalks, and the soldiers idly strolling the market square wear coats. It’ll be a year, almost, since Steve came to Europe first, the same month the 107th was fighting for their lives in northern Italy.

“We in trouble?” Dum-Dum asks, calling Steve back from his thoughts.

“No. No more than we ever are. We’re gonna double back to Lyon before they send us out to mop up a suspected base along the Swiss border.” The memo also said that, in between excoriating him for losing a valuable asset.

Dum-Dum taps his knuckles on the desk. “You run this by Sergeant Barnes yet, sir?”

“No.” At a certain point, self-preservation has to come into it, too. Every time he gets his hands on Bucky, he’s in danger of drowning. Bucky wasn’t in his bed this morning, just like he said, and Steve’s angry about it again, furious and jealous and heartsick. Oh _Christ,_ why didn’t he take that shot? “Guess I didn’t want to bother him.”

Instead of answering, Dum-Dum just sits there. For a man who talks as often and as loudly as he does, he’s got quite a monopoly on silences. Steve can remember far too many pointed silences between him and his second in command, dangerously loaded silences he’s never wanted to examine too closely. It seems simpler to look away.

“Captain…”

 _“Jesus,”_ he says, bitterly, staring out the window and not seeing. “It got out of hand too fast. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”

“I know.”

“He already doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t _sleep_ and he won’t let me…” He drops his head, looking at the ground. When the air starts to seize up in his chest, the compact dread suddenly expanding into amorphous terror, it helps to know that the ground is there. Today, it’s there. “I don’t know how to help him. He isn’t sleeping.”

“Are you sleeping?” says Dum-Dum. What a question. Steve shakes his head.

“No. Nobody sleeps much.”

“It’s hard to sleep after something like that.”

“It’s not about me. It didn’t happen to me.” That’s just the thing—he didn’t do anything. He just waited. Frozen like that, he could have stood there and watched the life in Bucky flicker out, there and gone. It’s his worst goddamn nightmare, losing the only person he has left, the only home he’s ever known, and he just watched.

He just _watched._

His fingernails bite into his palm, and when he releases, the sting of blood rushing back feels insufficient. Dum-Dum says, “Pain in the mind’s just as real, sir.”

“It’s not the same. We keep fighting and then this, and now—now I don’t know what to do. He won’t talk to me.”

It’s funny, because if there’s a line Steve crossed it long ago. It’s actually fucking hilarious because Steve’s not even listening to what he’s telling Dugan. He’s staring into space, spewing his guts up, not even caring what it sounds like.

Deep down, he knows what it sounds like. It sounds like the truth.

Dum-Dum shifts in his chair, uncomfortable somehow. “He’s a good kid. He’s just… if you’d been there, at the beginning. In Azzano. Maybe he felt like he couldn’t ever tell you about it.”

The word yanks him out of his reverie like a hook through his spinal column. Dum-Dum knew it would. They wouldn’t tell him. Bucky retold the story as the thrill of their escape and glossed over what it was that they were escaping. Steve has only heard them _say_ Azzano a handful of times, always hushed. It was the real chasm between them, never crossed, not even once.

Until now.

He turns from the window, sits back down at the desk. Dum-Dum sits on one side, face impassive, and Steve sits on the other. His heart beats in his throat, full and swollen. “What happened in that factory, Dum-Dum.”

Right away, Dum-Dum says it. “He almost died, sir. Couple times, actually.” He ignores Steve’s flinch of pain and keeps going, voice steady. “Got pneumonia pretty bad, got into it with a guard that liked to see him suffer. Cruel bastard. Got off on the pain he could cause, and there was something about the kid that he wanted to break.”

Who, Bucky? To Steve, Bucky is never _the kid_. Never could be, when he was a head taller and fit into his body like he owned it. Like he’d been born with adult secrets that Steve could never grasp. Even now, in a body scientifically perfected, Steve’s doubts remain. The math doesn’t add up. He can’t be that kid they all see in him, so there was no reason for someone to torture him for the fun of it.

Only, he’s seen the scars on Bucky’s hipbones, shiny like silver dollars.

“Well, we took care of him. The guard,” he clarifies. “Bucky was young and we liked him. We made it look like an accident, but they came for Bucky anyway. Nobody ever came back when they went off to the cells, so we thought he was dead. Hoped he was. You could hear the screaming some nights, when the machines weren’t running. Awful, awful screaming.”

Nauseated, Steve pushes back in his chair. “Jesus.”

“He made us laugh, though,” Dum-Dum says, and there’s something different in his face when he says it. Memory. Something specific. “Before he got taken. Always talking, even when he had pneumonia. He told us about you.” He looks up, meets Steve’s eyes. “Actually, it was pretty hard to get him to shut up about you.”

“He told you about me?” he asks. Beneath the table, his hands are shaking.

He nods. If he notices how wild Steve is on the inside, he doesn’t say; he must know, he must be able to guess, but he doesn’t bring it up. “It passed the time. And it was hard, in there, to talk about the outside world when we didn’t have much hope of ever seeing it again. But he talked. Told us about you trying to enlist five times and how mad that made him. About your art. He thought you were on the USO tour to do art somehow, set design or something, and he was so damn proud of you. He was _so_ proud, Steve. We were all about to die any minute and he wouldn’t stop talking about you.”

“Jesus. Jesus Christ, _I—fuck.”_

He’s crying. Dum-Dum sits there, unable to make him feel better and not bothering to try. Three or four slick tears fall down his cheeks, and then he smears the wet away with the heel of his hand.

“Sir…” Hesitating, Dum-Dum waits til Steve can breathe again. He’s wearing his dress uniform, and Steve has only just noticed that. Even his buttons are polished. “I know he came out of there different. But he’s still that same kid. There’s not a man in this unit who wouldn’t die for any one of us. But he’d walk through fire for you.”

Yes. And Steve couldn’t even take the shot for him.

“I know. I know,” he says heavily.

“You’ve been good to us. We owe you a lot, not least of all our lives. We would never say anything. No matter what we heard. We’d never do a thing to put you in danger.” He pauses, face not changing, no indication on his face of the gravity of what he’s saying. He leans forward to say, meaningfully, “Either of you.”

Steve could be jailed, stripped of his commission, smeared in the press. It would be worse for Bucky. That must be why. Steve doesn’t deserve it; it would be worse for Bucky. “Thank you.”

Dum-Dum nods. Then he rises and salutes, crisp and perfect, exactly the way a sergeant should. Steve doesn’t know what to do or say, too full up with shame to speak. “Sir,” Dum-Dum says.

This conversation is going to slide into the dregs of memory, and they’re not going to speak about it again. That’s the only reason he asks, “Do you think less of me, Tim?”

He must have expected the question. “No sir. I always knew. I could tell, when you found him in Azzano.” Then he hesitates—before saying, quietly and without reproach, “All due respect, Captain, but you don’t do a good job of hiding it.”

He laughs. “No,” he says, “No, I don’t.”

A leaf blows onto the windowpane and then whirls away. Dum-Dum doesn’t say anything more, and Steve won’t look at him. The fragile balance lasts a second longer, and then Dum-Dum again raises his hand. “Sir.”

Steve sits there for a long time, watching the waning sunlight play on the glass. He doesn’t know what to do now. He turns over everything he knows, everything he doesn’t know how to put into words. Azzano, the eggs, Lienske, the vita-ray machine that made him big, the beautiful French woman in the bar, the featherbed in that German farmhouse. The truth.

 _God,_ he could sleep for a century.

Another knock, this one as familiar as the breath in his lungs. He doesn’t have to look to know it’s Bucky at the door, deck of cards in his hand, pink-cheeked and healthy and unaware, as far as Steve can tell, that Steve is in love with him. But he looks anyway.

“Hey Steve,” he says, arms crossed.

Steve pushes back in his chair. “Look what the cat dragged in,” he says. His voice is almost steady.

“You’ve been sitting there too long,” says Bucky. He smiles. The bruise marring his throat has faded uncommonly fast, to a green that’s barely there. It’s not obvious that someone nearly choked him to death three days ago, just as it isn’t obvious that he spent half the night awake with Steve, lying in agonized, stifling silence. It’s invisible on his handsome, smiling face. “Come on. I’ll let you cheat at poker, that always cheers you up.”

“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t give a shit about the war or HYDRA or how tired he is or any of it; to tell the truth, he just wants Bucky. All of him, however he can get him.

Christ, Steve doesn’t know how he’ll get out of this war alive.

“Yeah,” he says, and he gets up. “Okay, Buck.”

Bucky goes on ahead.

Steve follows.


End file.
